


Blue Milk

by harmonicanoise



Category: Star Wars - All Media Types, Star Wars Prequel Trilogy, Star Wars: The Clone Wars (2008) - All Media Types
Genre: Captain Rex - Freeform, Clone Wars, Creepy, F/M, Horror, Jedi, Monsters, Mystery, New Planets, Original Character(s), Outer Space, Planets, Post-Ahsoka, Post-Star Wars: Attack of the Clones, Pre-Star Wars: Revenge of the Sith, Psychological Horror, SCP, SCP-597, Star Wars: The Clone Wars (2008) Spoilers, Temptation, The Dark Side of the Force, The Force
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-03-01
Updated: 2020-04-02
Packaged: 2021-02-28 07:01:47
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 14
Words: 29,109
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22979551
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/harmonicanoise/pseuds/harmonicanoise
Summary: Somewhere in the farthest edges of Separatist space, the Mother stirs.A panicked Jedi master sends a mysterious plea for help after taking the planet Mukkoth. Anakin Skywalker and his loyal captain Rex lead the 501st in a mission to unravel the mystery surrounding the Jedi's disappearance. But Anakin, struggling with the recent loss of his padawan Ahsoka, is unbalanced; and though he might not know it, he is heading to a planet that could put his faith in his instincts to the test.Because Mother knows her children better than they know themselves: their hearts, their souls, their minds, the most basic instincts buried within them. And she has a way of twisting them to her advantage.
Relationships: Padmé Amidala/Anakin Skywalker
Comments: 49
Kudos: 36





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> So this is just something I've been bouncing around in my head for a while. I've been on kind of a Star War: The Clone Wars kick since the new season came out. Lately I found myself thinking a lot about what it must've been like for the clones to grow up in Kamino in such a cold, sterile environment. If you think about it, the clones have never known what parents are or are supposed to be. They've never known what it a mother's love feels like, or a father's smile. There's something horrible about that, something chilling that I felt inspired to explore. Hope you enjoy <3

“Mother _,_ ” the Captain said to himself. The word hung there like a flap of dead skin dangling from his lips, putrid, rotting. It circled in his mind like a flock of birds poised for the kill, again and again and again, _mother mother mother._ The only thought in the world.

Captain Bale and his clone troopers had been walking with the Jedi for weeks, but for the life of him he couldn’t remember why. Mother had taken their thoughts from them, and now all that remained was the endless march. The Captain’s heart burned with a _wanting_ that he’d never known like Mustafarian lava, setting his teeth on edge. He had to see her. He only had to see her, and that horrible wanting agony would go away. His thoughts circled again: _Mother mother mother_ in a loop that stretched to infinity. His feet cracked and bled in his boots. _Mother. Please._ He watched a leaf fall slowly down from the trees overhead, circling in some demented dance. _Please._

This reminded him suddenly of a creature he’d seen on a mission to Stevor VI, a small, white bird with wings speckled with bits of green like mold on a bloodied corpse. Its song had been high, sad, and beautiful as it took flight, swinging its pink dried-blood wings into the setting sun, over the twisted bodies of thousands of the Captain’s brothers. Stevor VI had been an especially costly siege; the Seppies had refused to give an inch. Strange, the Captain thought, that he couldn’t remember what any of his brothers had looked like that day, but he would always carry this bird with him. That saddened him. Maybe too many of his brothers had died for him to remember, to care about what they had been. The cost of war was too much sometimes.

The Captain could remember the names of the clone troopers that marched with him now: Diver, Hostile, Cable, Quota. They all walked in ragged formation, bruised and bleeding but refusing to stop the march. They could feel she was so close, _so close,_ and it infuriated them all enough to continue forward. It would not do to keep Mother waiting.

General Helcorru walked in front. The Jedi was a short, cold-blooded creature with scales and long, pointed teeth. His tail flicked back and forth in darting motions as he moved in a motion that was hypnotizing to the Captain. Helcorru’s Jedi robes had begun to rot and stink off of him in rags. The clones were in similar shape, though their smudged, cracked armor covered it up a bit more. Water was scarce on this planet, and the liquid that was there wasn’t fit for washing and bathing. The Jedi’s eyes were yellow, and they _hated._ This seemed faintly wrong to the Captain, though for the life of him he couldn’t think of why with Mother dragging his feet and his thoughts away from him. The General had sent a signal out to the Republic back at base camp. A warning: _Mother needs help. Send reinforcements. Mother is hungry._

They marched for another night and another day before collapsing into a sleep marked with fever dreams. The Captain dreamed that he was floating in one of the embryo tanks he’d seen on Kamino, the place he’d been grown and fed and taught to kill. The water was dark and warm, and the Captain pounded at the glass that surrounded him with shriveled hands of blood. The long, white faces of the Kaminoans were ghosts to him, warped by the water and the glass into swirls of twisted pale flames. When he woke, he shivered.

( _mother_.)

The word had a certain kind of joy to it. A peace. The Mother was waiting, and it loved.

The Captain forced himself to his feet. Compulsion forced him to push forward, though his feet blistered and ached and cried and for a second the Captain felt nauseous. His brothers followed.

Night followed, then day, then night again. They ran out of water. The Captain had to kneel and hesitantly bottle the dark, clotted blue sap that poured from the trees surrounding them. Mukkoth seemed to have nothing to offer but trees with bent, twisted branches and listless fog. Mud sucked at the troopers’ feet like mouths as they walked, and the trees formed canopies that, along with the help of the fog, pushed all light into a watery gray haze that hung in the air like a stench. The days and nights were only marked by darkness; it was impossible to tell when the beginning, middle, or end of a day was otherwise.

The sap was sweet, but it was tainted by Mother. It turned the compulsion to walk into a drive, almost a lust. Hostile began to mutter things after his third drink. “Seppies,” he kept saying, “dam Seppies I’ll rip their wires out live and quivering from their shells I’ll kill them all I’ll kill them good soldiers follow orders…” He wandered off the path, and the troopers kept marching forward.

The Jedi caught up with them then. His feet were trailing blue pus.

The Captain drank more milk, and thought more and more of Mother. How sweet her voice was, how lovely her eyes must be. How tender and perfect her hands, how long and smooth her hair. She would sing a song to him when he came to her, a song he’d heard when he was a boy on Kamino. _“Snow is sweet and hail is bitter…_ ” He’d never seen snow. It only rained on Kamino, day in, day out. He’d seen snow once when he, General Helorru and General Windu had captured the Seppie base on Mantak. It hadn’t tasted sweet, but the memory had made him smile.

 _I will taste sweet,_ Mother whispered. In his mind, she was human. He saw her slip her breasts free and watched beads of cool, pure milk pour in trails like tears down her skin. His mouth watered. He began to walk faster.

A long, gray day. The fog worked its way into his bones and he began to shiver in earnest. The Captain thought he’d never been this cold before, but the thoughts he had of Mother warmed him.

And then, finally--

They were home.

They were at the opening of a massive cave, a passage that stretched into blackness like the throat of some long-dead, crystallized creature. His feet ached. Nothing else seemed to matter.

He couldn’t even remember reaching the end of the passage, couldn’t recognize the smell once he’d forced himself awake and realized, with a low, stirring pleasure, that he was close to Mother.

The General’s blade erupted from its scabbard in a burst of green plasma. He cut a passage through the vines that grew and breathed in this place. Mother’s presence was powerful here, sweltering. Bale sighed, almost moaned in ecstasy. The force that had pulled him here was so much stronger, this love that pulled him to his mother’s arms.

When he finally saw her, she was beautiful.

Her skin rippled and rolled in delicious waves of stone-grey fat dotted with nipples like shining pearls on an evening dress. Veins pulsed like clear, shining streams just beneath her bulging skin, streams that Bale suddenly wished to drown himself in forever. But most lovely of all was the rotted, clotted liquid pouring in cool streams down the dozens of nipples crossing her chest, the stinking curdled milk like the sap in the trees but colder, stronger, and Bale registered dimly that there were already five of his brothers latched like babes to her nipples, sucking away eagerly next to the rat-like creatures and the lizards and the slime huddled around that cool delicious blue life. Bale’s knees turned to water. He thought he had never known such pleasure before now, such peace, such shining beauty. He hardly noticed the skulls - some human - crowded in piles at Mother’s feet, picked shining clean.

Quota and Diver went eagerly, practically leaping on one of her teats. The General followed soon after, throwing his lightsaber to the ground. That left only Diver and his Captain standing awed before the Mother’s unholy beauty.

Diver took one long, last look at his Captain. His eyes were crazed. His hands seemed to twitch, once, and then he took his gun from his holster and in one fluid motion put it to his temple. “Hostile was right,” he said, his eyes dead in their sockets. “Dam Seppies got us again.” He fired.

The Captain looked towards Mother. Her radiance shone brighter than the stars, warm like a cup of soup on a long, wet night, like a woman’s arms. His feet didn’t budge. He couldn’t seem to get them to move; they seemed to have wandered away and gotten a mind of their own. _What’s the matter with me?_ Bale wondered. _She’s so… so…_ His eyes fell on one of the nipples squirting dark, thick milk like curdled blood. His mouth suddenly seemed very dry.

 _Drink,_ Mother whispered. Her voice was rain that shone with the rays of summer sun, glimmering with a thousand shapes and colors, each more stunning than the last. The Captain’s feet came undone, and he tripped, then ran to his mother’s side. And he obeyed.


	2. Chapter 2

Captain Rex knocked gently on the door to the General’s quarters. “General?” he said hesitantly, “We’ve got an incoming transmission.”

There was a great, rolling sigh from within. “Come in, Rex.”

When Rex walked in, he saw that the General was sitting cross-legged on the floor, his hands folded casually in his lap; it was, Rex knew, the way the Jedi meditated. Rex felt a pang of concern. He didn’t like how much the General had been off by himself lately. He barely ate anymore, and judging from the bags under his eyes he barely slept. Some of the troopers had begun to grumble. It wasn’t good for a general to spend so much time away from his men.

“Well, who’s calling?” he asked, frowning.

“The Council, sir.”

“I’ll be there in a minute.” The Jedi emerged, pantherlike, from the floor and stretched so far forward that it made Rex wince. Then the General rose, straightened, and made his way along with Rex to the bridge.

The bridge of the _Perseverance_ was swarming with clones who, upon seeing the General, straightened and snapped into smart salutes. Endless stars glittered before them, cold, distant, without a planet in sight. An empty desert of space.

The General rubbed his eyes with his durasteel hand and stood in front of the Holotable. General Windu and General Kenobi flickered to life in front of them in ghostly blue miniature.

“Anakin!” Kenobi said warmly. “It’s good to see you. I heard the siege on Nopell went well.”

The General seemed to light up at the sound of Kenobi’s voice. “It did. No thanks to you,” he said, grinning. 

Kenobi chuckled. “No thanks to me."

“So, uh… what’s going on?”

Windu cleared his throat. “We’ve just received an alarming transmission from Master Helcorru. He was on Mukkoth destroying a Separatist base when he suddenly stopped sending daily reports to the Temple.”

“Mukkoth?” the General frowned. “Isn’t that in Separatist space?”

“On the far edge,” Kenobi agreed. “The mission was important. There were rumors that the Separatists were developing some kind of bomb there. But the last message he sent was… alarming, to say the least.” Kenobi crossed his arms in his typical worried, dignified style. Windu nodded, and the ghostly figure of Kenobi pulled a transmitter from his pocket and pressed play.

A voice wheezed and sputtered into life: “ _Mother needs help. Send reinforcements. Mother is hungry.”_ Kenobi stopped the recording.

The General seemed to muse for a while. “Who is this Mother?” he asked.

“That’s what we’re asking you to find out,” Windu replied curtly.

“Master Windu, my men are tired-”

“All of our men are tired,” Windu snapped, then sighed. “We are spread thin, and your position appears to be closest to Mukkoth. So Skywalker, if you are not too _tired_ , we would all appreciate it if you would look into the matter.”

The General’s face flared up red. He seemed to struggle against saying something, but in the end all he said was, “Yes, Master.”

Kenobi’s expression turned concerned. “Good luck, Anakin. May the Force be with you.”

“With you too, Master.” The hologram faded. The General turned towards the cockpit. “Set a course for Mukkoth,” he commanded.

“Yes, sir.”

The hyperdrive slammed to life, and the stars turned to long streamers of light around them as the 501st sprinted forward to its doom.

* * *

The _Perseverance_ jolted uncomfortably out of hyperdrive five hours later. Rex had to shake the General out of his meditations once again, realizing with a faint pang that he hadn’t seen him in the mess hall that day. Rex wondered idly what thoughts the General was so fixated on. _Ahsoka would’ve known the answer_ , Rex thought, and winced internally. The loss of the General’s padawan was still fresh in everyone’s minds.

Still, Rex said nothing as the General made his way back up to the bridge, staring blankly out at the cold stars that spread endlessly through the utter darkness of space. The planet of Mukkoth spun into view. Its surface was mottled green and blue, covered in clouds that swirled in slow circles above its surface.

The General seemed to concentrate for a moment in the Force. “Swing hard to port,” he said finally.

“Yes sir.” The nose of the _Perseverance_ dipped back, then steadied. Soon enough, wreckage appeared in the distance as if by magic. Little bits of metal and durasteel floated dreamily past the bay windows. The scraps gave way to chunks of metal, then to the floating wreck of a Republic cruiser which hung, gutted, as a thin skeleton, listing slightly to the side like a body rolling over in its final sigh.

“That’s the _Ambition,_ ” Rex exclaimed when he’d finally found his voice. “Definitely Helcorru’s ship.”

The General nodded in response. “Get a squad together, Rex,” he commanded. “We’re boarding that vessel.”

“Yes sir.” Within the hour, the General was boarding a transport vessel with the five men Rex had managed to scramble together in time that were trained in zero-grav simulations. They strapped themselves into their spacesuits as CT-5006, Gripper, Rex thought his name was, booted up the engines and lifted them hesitantly into space.

Rex could only stare in silence at what was left of the _Ambition._ The cruiser had been one of the most fearsome in the Republic’s arsenal at one time, equipped with engines with five times the thrust of Kenobi’s _Leader_ (which some clones privately called the _Limper_ or worse). Its forward guns had been renowned for destroying entire battalions of Vulture droids with a single accurately aimed blow. Now, all that was left of those guns were bits of twisted metal hanging in sagging folds from the lips of its cruiser, who seemed to gush parts from a hole in its side like a bleeding wound. And the men-

The men were everywhere. Their skin was frozen dead white, their blank eyes staring from within their sunken, slack faces as they floated slowly onward as if on some calm tide towards the sea. Some were dressed in shining white armor; others were still dressed in night clothes, as if they had been shaken awake by whatever had caused their end. Yet as they spun in graceful arcs towards the stars, they all wore the same calm expression. Together they shared a certain peace. Rex had seen that look a thousand times on a thousand faces on the battlefield. He supposed one day he would wear it, too.

The silence in the ship held an almost religious reverence. _They were good men. They were soldiers,_ Rex thought. His heart twisted into a hard knot in his chest. _I hope you have found your peace, brothers, wherever you are. I hope the Force is with you._

The boarding party landed on the _Ambition_ by way of the hole blown in its side. Rex was the first to finally speak. “The ship is listing, General,” he said. The words seemed too loud in his ears compared to whatever quiet song the dead had just sung in their silence. “It might be dangerous. We will need to be vigilant,” he finished lamely.

The General seemed to snap out of a daze. “Yes… You’re right, Rex,” he agreed. He looked absurd in his suit, a lightweight contraption with an unsightly glass bowl tacked onto it that provided him with air. The rest of the clones only wore modified helmets and rebreathers. “Let’s go,” he said, emerging into the depths of the ship. The troopers followed suit, and with a loud click, seven pairs of magnetic boots strapped themselves onto the broken hull.

They had landed in a long, dark hallway that, upon further inspection, seemed to be leading them to the mess hall and the Captain and General’s quarters. Wires hung in jittering snakes from the walls, occasionally letting off sparks and a faint, threatening hum. They found more dead troopers wandering the halls, twisted in the air like marionettes dangling from a string. Their eyes seemed to follow them through the shadows. His eyes. They were Rex’s eyes too.

They took a right, then a left, then walked straight for what seemed like an eternity before walking into the bridge. The ship groaned and rolled slightly - Rex tripped forward and caught the wall - then steadied. Her bridge was admittedly still impressive, one of the most advanced of its day. A narrow bridge led them to a stunning wash of stars swimming in a window of reinforced permaglass that stretched for long meters where walls would normally have been. The sight would have been beautiful if two more corpses hadn’t been suspended in front of it. But even they had a kind of eerie grace to their own movements, as if they were stuck in an endless dance.

The trooper that Rex knew as Cutter stepped forward and started to rifle through the holotable that rose before the _Ambition’s_ main controls. The General bent under the table and began to help him. The General was a kind of electronic whiz, Rex knew, a trait that had gotten them out of several fixes in the past. There was a reason why the _Perseverance_ still sailed despite his arrogant, often suicidal maneuvers. The General pulled a thick rope of wires out from its bottom and struck them together, once, twice, then gave the table a good, hearty slap, and sure enough, it flickered faintly to life. Cutter fast forwarded through the footage until he found the last recorded date, then hit play.

Ghostly blue troopers stood at their stations. Rex only counted three working the controls. “Pretty sparse crew,” he commented to the group. “Helcorru must have sent most of his men to the surface.” Nobody said anything to that, so Rex guessed they agreed.

A fourth clone trooper sprinted, panting, into view. “...Bomb….!” he gasped. “They’ve set a bomb… Troopers, our own _men_ … We’ve got to leave… _Now_ …” 

One of the clones rose from his seat. “Tuck, what’re you talking abou-” The transmission cut off there. The table gave one last weak flicker and died. Rex looked up at the corpses floating above them into the shadows of the tastefully arched ceiling. Those had probably been their last words. They no longer seemed peaceful to Rex anymore; now, they seemed to grin. Rex had to fight off a shudder. The ship rolled beneath his feet again, as if on cue.

“We should leave,” Rex said abruptly. The General gave a murmur of assent. They started back without argument.

“This place is cursed,” Rex heard Cutter mutter as they walked. “There’s somethin’ strange in the air around here. It don’t feel right.” Rex was normally not the superstitious type, but as they passed the graveyard of floating men in their ship once again, he was inclined to agree.

Back at the ship, the General immediately made his way to the holotable and contacted the Council. Rex had to look at the _Perseverance_ with new eyes. He couldn’t seem to stop himself from picturing this same bridge littered with scraps and dead things.

“...mutiny,” the ghostly form of General Windu was saying. “Uncommon, but not unheard of in clones. I heard something similar happened with your own battalion at the Battle of Umbara.”

“But Krell was a traitor,” the General protested. “My men got rid of him because they saw him for what he was. I’ve fought with Helcorru before. He would never betray the Republic.”

“Helcorru may have been a traitor in their eyes as well,” Kenobi suggested gently. 

That only seemed to make the General angrier. “Rex, come here,” he said, beckoning him forward before turning back to the Jedi. “Hear what my captain has to say about Umbara. You were one of the leaders of the revolt on Umbara, right?”

Rex nodded. “You know I was, sir.”

“And what do you think about the idea of mutiny?”

Rex hesitated. “We turned on Krell because he was fighting against us,” he said slowly, choosing his words carefully. He was all too aware of the eyes of three of the most powerful Jedi in the galaxy looking back at him. “We wanted to be loyal to the Republic. It’s impossible, I think, for any one of us to be disloyal. Clones might disagree or go AWOL sometimes, but they would never turn fully against the Republic. It’s against our programming.” He said this with a certain swell of pride.

Windu frowned. “That may be,” he remarked, “But perhaps those clones became loyal to someone or something else. In any case, the matter requires more exploration. I look forward to hearing your reports, Skywalker. Keep me posted, and may the Force be with you.”

“And with you, Master.” Both parties bowed and the transmission ended. The General turned to Rex. “We’ll send half our ships to the surface and begin to retrace Helcorru’s steps,” he commanded. He looked out towards the mottled blue-grey planet, his durasteel hand tightening around the grip of his lightsaber. “Be on your guard, Rex. I sensed some strange things on that ship. Dark things.”

“Yes sir.” The General looked almost scared. That terrified Rex more than anything he’d seen on the _Ambition_ . Anything that could spook a Jedi, especially _this_ Jedi, couldn’t be good. Rex got a sinking feeling in his stomach. He had a bad feeling about this.


	3. Chapter 3

Locked in his quarters, Anakin sat alone.

He closed his eyes, taking deep breaths in, out, in… out. In… He slipped quietly into the Force, letting himself be swept away into the smooth streams of consciousness. He felt the stream; he _was_ the stream. He floated onward into the abyss in calm surrender. _Ahsoka,_ he said to the waves pulling him under. _Show me Ahsoka._ He was attempting to capture a single droplet of water in an endless current, the single shining light that was his padawan out there, somewhere, in the Force. But the Force didn’t seem to be listening. No matter how hard he tried, Anakin couldn’t seem to get it to do what he wanted. Frustrated, Anakin opened his eyes and groaned through gritted teeth. _Isn’t there supposed to be some kind of special bond between a Master and a Padawan?_ he thought angrily. If there was, then why wasn’t it working? Anakin looked down again at the comm link fastened to his arm. _Pick up, Ahsoka,_ he thought. _It’s been weeks._ Anakin had always been a bit of an insomniac, but he’d been barely able to sleep lately worrying that she was in trouble or hurt or--

No. He couldn’t let himself think that. Anything but that.

But something inside him whispered, _It would be your fault. You let her leave._

“She made her decision,” Anakin said out loud. “She couldn’t trust the Council. She couldn’t trust herself.”

_She couldn’t trust you._

“I’m not listening to this,” Anakin declared, then realized with some embarrassment that he was talking to thin air. His eyes fell on his bunk, which was noticeably untouched. _I should get some sleep._

It was at that exact moment that Captain Rex knocked on his door. “The scouts have landed, sir,” the muffled voice of Rex told him. “They say that the atmosphere’s breathable. We should get down there.”

Anakin sighed. “Yeah, I guess we should.” Groaning, he felt around with his hands until he found a bag and began stuffing random odds and ends in: a change of clothes, rations, a tracking device, anything that looked useful. _Obi-Wan would’ve been ready hours ago if he was here,_ he thought, and smiled. _He would’ve been yelling at me to get going._ He clipped his lightsaber belt around his waist. The thought made him a little sad.

They left a skeleton crew of troopers on the _Perseverance_ to guard it in space, and sent the rest down in smaller ships to the surface. “We have a lot of ground to cover,” Rex kept saying, “And the more men we have on the ground searching, the faster we can find Helcorru if he’s really in trouble.” Anakin couldn’t argue with his logic. As they flew down to the surface, lagging behind the supply trains (Rex had waited until the last possible moment to take off, compelled to triple-check that everything was in order), he saw that it would have been nearly impossible to take the _Perseverance_ on land anyway; Mukkoth was nearly completely covered with huge, twisted trees and mountains that occasionally dotted the surface like exclamation points between them. They would have had to clear miles of trees to even create a space for the cruiser to sit in, much less a landing zone.

As they approached the ground, Anakin could see clones already hard at work chopping at trees with Republic-issued buzz saws and setting up rough pavilions of canvas tents. It was a dance that they all knew well from landing on hundreds of strange, often wild planets.

They landed with a series of wet _splats._ Anakin, Rex, and the few stragglers onboard emerged from the inside of the ship to regard the planet with stranger’s eyes. Mud sucked at Anakin’s boots, letting out faint squishing noises as he walked. The air was ripe with the smell of something that he remembered but couldn’t quite place. Bent, twisted trees surrounded the camp like sentries, their limbs twisted into arches that formed long, straight tunnels into darkness. They seemed to Anakin like arteries of some forgotten beast of the woods, sighing with each breath of wind. A thick fog covered everything in a layer of watery gray. But most striking of all was the blue sap that trickled in thick wet streams from the trees into the standing water at their feet, giving everything a soft, glowing blue hue. Yellow swampgrass stuck up straight and still from the mud. Anakin stood in the midst of all of this, and felt it in the Force.

The wind stirred; there was a sigh, a wash of desert heat, a smell of oil and slavestew sold at market, a face turning just out of view. 

_Ani._

Anakin whirled. A thought came to him like a breath of dizzyingly fresh air:

_(Mom.)_

In a flash of light, his lightsaber was drawn and ignited at his side, his feet in a rough Form Three. Goosebumps prickled along his neck. “Who’s there?” he called.

Silence. The clones had all begun to stop and stare.

“General…?” Captain Rex turned to him, looking concerned. Tension seemed to swallow the word as it sat there, wondering. “Do you sense something?”

Anakin blinked.

_(Mom where)_

_(dead)_

_(every single one of them)_

Anakin took a long, hard swallow. Something seemed to be stuck in his throat. He sheathed his lightsaber. 

_I’m going insane._

“Nothing… it’s nothing, Rex,” he managed to say. He noticed with a sudden shock that many of the troopers had drawn their weapons as he had drawn his, preparing for some imminent attack. Rex put his hand up in the universal motion for _stand down_ and everyone seemed to relax.

Anakin suddenly felt very tired.

“Are you alright, sir?” Rex asked worriedly.

Anakin brought a shaking hand to his temple, closing his eyes as if he could wish the memory away. “I think I just need to lie down for a while,” he said wearily.

Rex turned toward his troops. “You heard the general,” he barked. “Get his quarters ready. Now, now!” He looked back towards Anakin, a crease forming between his eyes. “What happened?”

“I don’t know,” Anakin answered. “I thought I heard something, but…” No, that wasn’t quite it. It hadn’t been a sound, it had been a feeling.

This only seemed to make Rex more worried. He opened his mouth to say something, stopped, then opened it again. “Tell me if you need anything,” he said finally before rushing off to help a squad that seemed to be suffering under the weight of a giant box of provisions.

Anakin shivered. He’d finally realized what that familiar scent was; Mukkoth stunk of Tatooine. It didn’t have the shifting sands or bantha poodoo that had littered the streets of Mos Eisley, but both planets had the same strange smell of sweat and blood and sewage and rotting meat, that same smell that permeated through every dank alley he’d ever walked through in the lower levels of Coruscant. And it had hints of something that was suspiciously similar to the sweet perfumes his mother had hid from their slavemaster Watto all those years ago.

But then again, that was probably just his imagination. Just his sleep-deprived mind spinning shadows into nanosilk, as the old saying went.

His tent was finished by the time he arrived. He could feel dozens of eyes following him as he went inside. Anakin curled himself up in his bedroll and tried to think calming thoughts, but sleep wouldn’t come. Even as light turned to darkness, he found himself staring up at the ceiling, thinking _Ahsoka_ and _It would be my fault_.

Anakin sat up. He couldn’t take it anymore. He crept slowly out of his tent, looking around for sentries, and quietly slipped a ways into the woods until the campfires of the 501st were little more than blinking lights in the distance. He took a comm pad from his pocket, sat it down on a stone, and waited.

After about the fourth ring, she answered, and Anakin’s heart leapt for joy. His wife somehow managed to look stunning even in blue holographic form, with her hair down in a loose bedhead tangle. She yawned. “Anakin?” she murmured, half-asleep.

“Padme!” Anakin couldn’t stop himself from smiling. “I’m sorry for calling so late, but I just... I just wanted to see you,” he finished slowly.

Padme let out a sleepy grin. “That’s sweet, Ani,” she said. “Where are you right now?”

“Mukkoth.”

“Mukkoth, hm?” Padme rubbed at her eyes. “Where’s that?”

“A long ways out from Coruscant,” Anakin replied, somewhat sadly.

They talked for a while about life and work and love, and at the other side of the conversation, Anakin felt a little stronger. That’s what Padme did to him; she made him feel complete. Without her, he always felt lost. They talked until Padme relented and told him she had a Senate trial to get to right away tomorrow that she couldn’t sleep her way through, but even then they couldn’t seem to stop finding new things to talk about. Finally, Padme had to put her foot down and say the final word.

“I miss you, Ani,” she told him in a voice choked with tears.

“Miss you too.” He suddenly found it very difficult to swallow.

“Come back to me soon,” Padme pleaded, and then she was gone. Anakin smiled for a little while to himself. He slept soundly the rest of the night.

* * *

Even in daylight, the long tunnels of arched trees were swallowed by darkness and fog. The clones lit the way ahead with small flashlights fastened to their helmets, Anakin with the glow of his lightsaber. He slashed at hanging moss and twisted branches, trying to move quickly to fend off the chill that the thick gray fog was pressing into him. Whatever he had heard last night already seemed like a distant dream. The only thing that existed to him now were the endless trees marching in battle-straight rows in the mist, lit up in eerie fluorescent blues that reminded Anakin of holoscans. It was as if the entire planet wasn’t real; only an illusion, an endless mirage that clung to his boots and splattered his legs in mud.

Rex, of course, was at his side. Four other clones walked with them. Anakin had learned that their names were Cutter, Spare, Nerves, and Tails. He knew Cutter and Nerves from mentions in passing and Spare by reputation, but Tails remained unknown to him. Anyways, it was easy to see where he’d gotten the name from; he’d tied several ribbons in his hair from their raid on the Jade Palace six months ago. Tails was fond of reminding everyone that despite the fact that the ribbons extended past his shoulders, his hair was still technically cut to regulation standards.

“When we get back to camp,” Rex was saying, “I’m cutting those off your head.”

Tails backed up, shocked. “You wouldn’t! My hair is-”

“Regulation-friendly, we know,” Nerves finished. Though he was wearing a helmet, it was easy to guess that he was rolling his eyes. “Captain, can we court-martial him if he says no?” he asked Rex. “Say he’s disobeying orders, or something? Please tell me we can.”

Cutter shushed them hurriedly. “Guys, shut up. I think I see something ahead.” He lifted his electrobinoculars to his visor. They waited in hushed silence, watching him fiddle with the specs. “I think it’s a settlement.”

“Let me see that,” Rex commanded, and once handed the binoculars, confirmed it. “Must be the natives,” he commented. “I doubt Separatists camp out in mud huts.”

He turned out to be right. As they kept walking, they found themselves heading towards the shining light of a blue pond that glowed unnaturally in the mist. A collection of huts large and small surrounded it, none larger than the massive stone fortress that rose at its side. Tall, thin creatures wandered among them. They appeared to be vaguely humanoid, but most appeared to reach the height of seven feet and all walked with a pronounced hunch. Their skin appeared to be unnaturally white and smooth, their eyes and noses small black dots in their long, stretched faces. Two of them approached the group curiously, poking their spears into their sides. They said something in a low, gargling tongue.

Anakin wished, perhaps for the first time in his life, that C-3PO was with them. The fussy droid would’ve been a great help here. He and Rex exchanged looks, and Anakin said hesitantly, “I’m sorry, I don’t understand you.”

The natives eyed his lightsaber. Then they turned, motioning for the group to follow. Upon closer inspection, the huts appeared to be more cleverly made than at first glimpse; complex nets of knots and bolts anchored them to the shifting mud, and the wood that formed their roofs was worn smooth and often carved with swirling designs of leaves and birds and animals unnamed. The natives led them past all of these settlements, though, and brought them to the front gates of the stone fortress that they had seen rising on the banks of the pond.

The stone fortress was much more imposing from this side. It was easily five stories tall, carved with the likeness of the natives on every square inch of its surface. Most of them seemed to be naked and twisted in every sort of agony that you can imagine, their mouths wide and raw and screaming.

“I have a feeling we’re not gonna like the guy that lives here,” Rex murmured.

“Nope, not at all,” Anakin demurred, grinning.

The natives led them into a vast entrance hall covered in shimmering gems of every color, then down a hall into a smaller chamber where a creature sat with six guards surrounding him, studying them coldly. He wore long black robes and a hood that threw everything but his eyes into shadow.

“Jedi,” he said. His voice was low and sharp like the scrape of a knife against bone. “I am Holleck son of Holleck, servant of the Mother Who Stirs. You will tell me why you have returned to our homeland.”

So he spoke Basic. That was a good sign, Anakin told himself. “A Jedi, carrying something like this--” Anakin drew his lightsaber from his belt, showing it to the native, “--has been out of contact with us. We are only here to find him. Lead us to him, and we’ll be on our way.”

Holleck son of Holleck let out a sudden, chilling laugh. “Oh, I’m sure I will follow him one day,” he responded, “but I hope I am much older then.”

Anakin frowned. “What is that supposed to mean?”

“He’s dead, you fools,” Holleck said, his eyes glittering with sudden amusement. “He has gone to Mother. You should’ve left this planet well enough alone. I’ve heard that Mother likes the way newcomers smell.”

 _Mother._ Anakin remembered the transmission: _Mother needs help. Send reinforcements. Mother is hungry._ He remembered with a sudden jolt the feeling that he’d had when he’d stepped off the ship, then shrugged the memory away. He’d been sleep-deprived. It could’ve been his imagination. “Who is this Mother?” he asked.

Holleck son of Holleck leaned back in his chair, studying them again. “Stay here tonight,” he said finally. “Come to the Duskfire as my honored guest. There, you will learn. Then you will leave.” He gestured towards a shorter native hunched against the wall in the shadows, just out of sight. “Take them to their rooms and find them something suitable to wear,” he commanded. The servant ushered them out with calm but firm hands, impatient. Anakin looked back towards Holleck son of Holleck. He was smiling. His teeth were knives.


	4. Chapter 4

Cutter picked at his clothes, his mouth twisted in disgust. “Do we really have to wear this?” he demanded.

“Yes.” Rex answered him sternly, but he seemed to fidget in his clothes as well. The natives, who they now knew called themselves the Borum, had insisted that they wear what was apparently traditional garb to their Duskfire. Whatever that was. That traditional garb being long, black robes made of a material that seemed to absorb all light around it and, as an added bonus, was extremely itchy.

“I dunno,” Tails said, scratching, “I kinda like it. I feel like a Jedi.”

“Jedi robes are supposed to be comfortable,” Anakin grimaced, digging at his arms. “And since when have you seen a Jedi wear all black? Black robes are for Sith.”

“I dunno, General, I think you look good in it,” Tails replied, quite seriously. The other clones laughed. The Borum, being quite a bit taller than them, had clearly given Anakin, Rex, Cutter, and Nerves child-sized robes (though somehow the sleeves were still quite long and baggy), but they seemed to have run out of spares so Tails, wearing an adult-sized version, was constantly tripping over his hem, which flowed out in a wedding train behind him. It made him look somewhat ridiculous.

“Looks like you’re about to get married, Tails,” Nerves teased. “Who’s the unlucky girl?”

“Shove off, everyone knows he’s got a thing for droids,” Spare smirked. “Did you know that on patrol nights he goes off with an astromech and-”

“Guys,” Rex hissed, “Not in front of the General. Show some respect.”

Anakin’s smile fell. _Right. Not in front of the General._ He scratched his leg.

A thin Borum opened the door. “Holleck son of Holleck commands your presence,” he said grandly, and led them into a grand, sweeping dining room where Holleck waited at the end of a table stacked with strange meats and fruits.

Dinner was a slow, boring affair. The food that was laid out for them wasn’t nearly as delicious as it looked. All of it had a certain mushed, rotting flavor that made Anakin’s stomach flip in queasy rolls. _Obi-Wan would’ve loved this,_ he thought more than once. Obi-Wan loved to learn about different cultures and peoples, and he especially loved formal dinners. He would’ve been asking his host a thousand questions if he were here, and probably choking down his fair share of what appeared to be rotted panka fruit and proclaiming it delicious. As it was, dinner was strained and silent, the quiet only broken by the occasional probing done by Holleck son of Holleck and the constant scratching of the clones.

Anakin’s own arms were raw by the time Holleck son of Holleck declared himself satisfied and led them to the entrance hall they’d seen before, glittering with a thousand precious jewels. The gray light of Mukkoth made the jewels glint and spin before their eyes in hypnotizing waves. Holleck son of Holleck motioned to his guards to push open the front doors and they encountered, to their surprise, hundreds of Borum crowded on the steps below. Their host said something to his people and then started forward, motioning for Anakin and the clones to follow. The crowd parted around them. Curious eyes combed every inch of their faces and began to drop behind them in neat rows. It wasn’t long before they began to sing. Their voices were the color of exploded stars, of the morning blood suns on Tatooine, of the birds in the twisted trees. Their voices were so powerful and so sad that for a moment Anakin was swept away to a place that he did not know. His itch melted away.

They seemed to walk for a long time before reaching a clearing. The Borum formed a huge circle around its edge, lifting the hoods of their robes above their heads so that their faces were hung in shadows. Anakin and his clones did the same, though not without some muttered protests from Rex, who was still scratching fiercely at his neck. The rest appeared to have settled into their robes like Anakin had.

Holleck son of Holleck stepped forward and shouted something. Four braziers were lit around the edges of the clearing, flickering in the dim dusk light. He chanted something; the Borum sung back. They did this twice more before Holleck son of Holleck raised his arms, and total silence fell for a full minute. The quiet seemed to stretch forever. Even the wind seemed to have stopped to listen, and the birds were utterly silent. He lowered them. What appeared to be female Borum stepped forward into the circle; the ones with swollen bellies (pregnant, Anakin guessed), were placed in the very center.

Holleck son of Holleck motioned and a wide, shallow bowl was brought of him. Inside appeared to be the same blue sap that dripped from the trees around them, clotted and thick. Holleck tilted the bowl to his lips and drank deeply. The bowl passed to another, then another, until it found its way into Anakin’s hands. He hesitated. The mixture was curdled in a way that reminded him unpleasantly of fresh snot. Still, he closed his eyes and poured it in. The taste was sour, then sweet, then fresh and cool and perfect, a well in parched desert sands. He began to gulp it down eagerly. He suddenly felt so thirsty he thought he might drown as he let it slip down his throat, faster, faster, until the bowl was snatched from his hands and sadness descended upon him like the clouds of a sudden storm. The world lurched around him for a moment. His mouth felt very dry. The memory was already sweeter than the moment, and the moment had been oh, so sweet.

The bowl was passed to the women in the center. They began to fall to the ground and convulse suddenly, and Anakin tried to lurch forward but his feet wouldn’t seem to cooperate and he could only watch as their spines arched upwards as they screamed and screamed and screamed. Their legs pushed apart and their robes fell from their shoulders as their spines arched unnaturally, folding, twisting in worms beneath their thin skin. They were giving birth, Anakin realized with growing shock. Their nipples, now exposed, began to ooze thick, curdled blue milk in growing pools on the ground, and now the wooden bowl was in his arms again and he took another sip on instinct and the world fuzzed in and out of focus as the Borum began to shout something around him, and the women’s screams of pain were beginning to turn to screams of pleasure and laughter as they sang a slow, tragic hymn that rose and rose into a chorus of wails...

Everything went in flashes after that. A slash of dark blue against white. Mad laughter bubbling in his throat. A nipple clenched between his teeth. A dirge, soft and slow. Knives flashing in the dark. Then-

He was stumbling into the quarters that Holleck son of Holleck had given them in the stone fortress, and Holleck was saying something in Basic he couldn’t understand, and everything seemed so jumbled in Anakin’s mind that all he could do was nod. He collapsed into a pile of soft furs and was instantly drawn into the gaping jaws of sleep.

* * *

_Ani._

Light fingers brushed against his face.

_Ani, wake up. I need to see you._

His eyes snapped open. He smiled. Moonlight poured in stark white lines through his window, real moonlight, not the watery haze of Mukkoth. Wind blew a faint sigh against his skin. Anakin rose, gathering his robes around him. When he opened the door, he found himself staring at leagues and leagues of sand dunes, whistling soft and smooth melodies in the dark. Anakin stepped out, dug his feet into it. It was warm. Mom was waiting for him on the next rise. Her slavecloth dress flapped about her ankles in the wind, her hair tucked into its familiar sandscarf. Her face was lined with years of grief and toil. She was beautiful beyond words to him in that moment, more beautiful than anything Anakin had ever seen before.

_Ani._ She hugged him tight and close to her chest. _Do you love me?_

Anakin turned up to look at her, and he saw that she was crying. “I do,” he said earnestly. “I love you more than anything in the world, Mom. You know I do.”

_You did,_ she whispered. _Then you left me._ Her eyes were as sharp and cold as ice. _You left me a slave, when you could have made me free. You left until it was too late to come back._

“I know, Mom. I know.” Tears began to fall, unbidden, from Anakin’s eyes. “I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to…” He had to make her know, to _understand_. “I didn’t mean to.”

_Don’t lie to me, Ani. My heart is already broken._ More tears, harsh and cold, fell down her cheeks, which suddenly began to collapse slowly into themselves, the wrinkles around her eyes hardening and her arms and legs shrinking until her skin hung in thin, ragged flaps from her bones. _They tortured me for weeks,_ she whispered. _They pulled me apart, piece by piece._ She was starving to death before his eyes, and Anakin was left to plead and cry for love, for mercy, for life. Her breaths came out in stunted gasps. He couldn’t let this happen again, he couldn’t watch anymore, he couldn’t…

Anakin scrambled away, tears streaking down his face, and ran. Mother’s voice followed him. _No, not fear,_ she whispered in his ear, _Rage tastes sweeter._

_(No no Mom I’m sorry, I’m sorry for everything)_

Anakin stumbled and fell hard. He turned and saw the body of a Sand Person lying facedown with a smoking lightsaber wound in its side. It was crying out for help in long, piercing wails.

_(they were animals and I slaughtered them like animals)_

Anakin scrambled to his feet and ran and ran but there were always more bodies, more hands reaching out and grabbing at him with smoking wounds in their heads their hands their eyes begging _no no leave the children_ and suddenly Anakin’s lightsaber was in his hand and he was swinging wildly at nothing.

A Sand Person with a hole in his lung looked up at him with hate in his eyes. _We killed her slowly,_ he said with Mother’s voice. _We strung her up like meat for weeks until her hands wouldn’t work anymore._ Those same hands had brushed his hair and made him dinner and were always spotted with oil and stew. _We killed her slowly,_ he insisted.

_(every single one of them)_

Anakin couldn’t think about that, a Jedi wasn’t supposed to form attachments, wasn’t that what they told him so he ran and ran and ran until he found himself in the forest clearing, surrounded once again by mist and glowing blue. In the center stood a rough stone altar. Something silent and still was lying there under a white sheet. Anakin approached it hesitantly, wiping away at his snot and his tears. 

The sheet was covering a body. A very small body. Anakin wanted to move back but he kept walking forward, compelled by some horrible curiosity to look upon the thing and know it wasn’t real, wasn’t hurting anymore-

He drew back the sheet, slowly, painfully. It was a child. He made himself look at it, bile rising in his throat. The heart was torn open and bleeding thick, black blood. Smoke poured from the open wound and joined, twirling, with the endless fog. Anakin screamed. The guilt was visceral now, a gaping wound that clenched and twisted at his heart until he was in mortal agony, crying and begging Mother for forgiveness, pleading _I’m sorry I’m sorry I’m sorry._

He could sense Ahsoka behind him. He saw her look with disgust at the body on the altar. _To think I called you Master._ She turned away, hatred in her eyes. Hot, angry tears coursed down his face, anger at her, anger at himself for what he had let himself become.

And then Anakin was looking down at nothing, and he was alone.

* * *

Cutter, Tails, Spare, and Nerves rose as one in the night. The Mother was calling them home. They looked over, heads turning in perfect hive-mind sync, to see that their General was gone, their Captain sleeping as if half-dead. It was a moonless night, and darkness was their friend and their mistress as they crept quietly out the door. They walked into the woods until it had been hours since they’d seen another living soul. They knelt together.

“Mother,” Cutter said, his voice deep and utterly flat. “What would you have us do?”

_All in due time,_ she murmured. A breeze swept over the clearing, and all of the clones felt a warm sense of arousal sweep through them. _For now, you must drink._

Yes, all agreed. First, they must drink. They moved slowly to the trees and began to lick at the streams of curdled sap with their tongues. They would be ready for her when she came again.

* * *

Rex awoke the next morning with a faint headache and the lingering sense that something was wrong. He’d been dreaming about something, but the more he thought the more he couldn’t remember… It had been something terrifying, he remembered, something that was probably best left forgotten.

The General stumbled through the door a few minutes after. His eyes were huge and crazed, his hair strewn with leaves. “Rex,” the General said, “You’re awake. How much do you remember from last night?”

Rex tried to concentrate. “Not much,” he admitted. He looked around and noticed, with sudden alarm, that four of his men were gone. “Where’d everyone go?” he asked.

“What?” The General seemed lost for a second, then stared at the room and realized that there were four very important things missing from the picture. “Oh… I don’t know, I didn’t see them.”

“What were you doing out there?”

“N-nothing. I couldn’t sleep, so I took a walk…” The General’s eyes were red, Rex noticed with some concern, and he was shaking. _It must have been some walk,_ Rex thought grimly.

They waited for a long time, but none of them showed, not even Tails. Rex was starting to get worried. Try as he might, all he could remember last night was walking into the woods and drinking that… that… whatever that blue stuff had been that had tasted so sweet. The General seemed to regain a bit of his composure as they sat, and even seemed a bit embarrassed for showing up the way he did. He kept glancing at Rex and looking away just as quickly, fidgeting with his hands.

Rex went to talk with Holleck son of Holleck later that day to see if they could gather a search party together, but all the Borum did was laugh and say, “They’re lost now. Mother’s called them somewhere. They’re probably dead.”

Rex’s hands clenched into fists. “You don’t know that,” he snarled.

“So now you see your folly in coming here.” Holleck smiled his horrible smile. “I hope last night was enough to convince you to take your men and leave, Captain. Stay, and you will share the same fate as your lost four.” He seemed strangely insistent on that last part, placing particular emphasis on the word _lost_.

Rex studied the Borum. He knew his men. None of them would just walk into the woods without telling him. This Mother was only a part of the Borum’s belief system, probably spurred on by that strange blue sap that had made him hallucinate. After long, hard years on the battlefields of endless worlds with endless peoples, Rex had come to the realization that there were no gods. There was only faith, and the Force. There was no Mother. _They were taken,_ he thought, _but not by some god._ His eyes fell on the spears that the guards carried with their curved, sharp tips.

“I bet I would,” he replied, and left. He could only hope the Borum had kept them alive.


	5. Chapter 5

“...Quiet!” the General hissed, pressing against the wall. They stayed there frozen for a heartbeat, two, until the sound of footsteps came and went. The General seemed to concentrate in the Force for a moment; then he turned to Rex and whispered, “All clear.”

Rex’s feet ached in his boots. They had been searching the stone fortress for hours, and hadn’t found any sign of where the clones might have gone. Rex groaned internally. He hated tiptoeing around like this. He and the General were technically, as far as the Borum knew, heading back to camp right now; hence the sneaking. The General had suggested it as a way to catch the Borum with their guard down, maybe talking about, or -- in a perfect world -- heading towards where they’d hidden Cutter, Tails, Spare, and Nerves. The General had been enraged when he’d heard Rex’s theory of what might have happened to the four clones. “This is their way of getting us to leave,” he fumed. “Drugging us and stealing our men… This is a direct attack on the Republic! We’ll need to take them to Coruscant in binders after we find Helcorru.”

“Here,” the General whispered suddenly to Rex, snapping him back to the present. “I think I found something.” He led Rex into a small round room filled with mirrors of every size and shape under the sun, connected to giant tubes that snaked along the walls in seemingly random patterns. The General adjusted one of them, and the reflection in the mirror changed to a reflection of the gates outside the fortress, showing them a vision of life in real time.

“They’re like security cameras,” Rex remarked. He looked, but could find no evidence of wires or electricity running through the system; the mirrors appeared to be powered by magic. _This planet gets stranger and stranger,_ he thought.

The General fiddled around with them for a long time until he found a backside view of the quarters they’d slept in last night. Both watched closely as the warped mirror form of the General took off into the forest. Hours passed as he tilted a smaller mirror like a lens, then focused on the sight of the four missing clones walking together. They walked in perfect sync, their eyes focused and dull. Rex felt a shiver down his spine. So they really had walked off on their own. The General switched to several other angles, but they couldn’t find a single one that showed the Borum threatening them or jumping them at all. 

“The sap…” Rex mumbled, searching desperately for an explanation. “There has to be something weird in that blue stuff.” If only he could _remember…_

“This doesn’t prove anything,” the General said adamantly. “They could’ve tampered with the footage.”

“Sir, they didn’t know we were coming-”

“Maybe they did.” The General stood, placing a hand on his lightsaber. “Maybe they’re waiting for us right now.”

“Begging your pardon, sir, but we’ve been here for a while. If they were following us, I think they would’ve revealed themselves by now,” Rex pleaded. Had the General gone mad?

The General sighed. “You’re right, I would have sensed them.” He turned the mirror back again, watching the clones walk in a stupor to their doom. His brow furrowed. He mouthed the word _Mother_ quietly to himself. He seemed transfixed.

Rex waited a few moments, but the General didn’t move. Impatient, Rex cleared his throat. “We should get moving.”

The General snapped out of a trance. “...Right,” he said. “The sap, it has to be the sap. We should warn the men.”

Rex nodded. Finally, the General was starting to make sense. He seemed slightly better than he had that morning, though his eyes were still rimmed with red and every once in a while

he stared into nothingness, as if he had dropped into one of his now-frequent meditations behind the doors of his quarters in the _Perseverance._

_If Ahsoka were here, she could have made him laugh,_ Rex thought. _She would’ve been angry with him for shutting himself away._ Rex stared at the General. His tongue felt tied. He always felt so helpless in situations like this. _I’m worried about you, Anakin,_ he wanted to say, but he didn’t know if that would make things worse. The General was always hard to read. Unlike other Jedi, he switched between anger and joy and sadness like flashes of sudden lightning.

So all Rex said was, “Let’s head back,” and the General agreed. 

* * *

When Rex and the General arrived back at camp, the 501st was just emerging from its makeshift barracks, breakfast in hand. Rex found himself immediately attacked with questions: _Where did you go? Where’s Tails? Did you find anything? What happened to the rest of you?_

“Guys,” Rex tried to say, but the questions overpowered him in volume. “GUYS!” he bellowed. The camp grew silent. “Be quiet and let us speak, will you?”

“We found a settlement,” the General announced gravely to the growing crowd. “We spent the night. The natives, who call themselves Borum, aren’t Separatist-aligned, but I would be wary of them. They tried to feed us blue sap from trees just like this” -- he gestured all around them -- “And that sap was found to be deadly. It took four of our own from us. Last night, Spare, Nerves, Tails, and Cutter walked into the woods under the influence of this sap. Now, Priority Number One is to find them.” He turned to Rex. “Captain?”

“Alright, men. Listen up. Tuck, Quill, Kicks, Mutt, you’ll all be leading squads along with me and the General. Choose your men wisely. We’ll meet at the Command Tent at oh-eight-hundred.”

“Yes sir,” a chorus of voices answered. The crowd dispersed.

Rex left to make the preparations for his own squad. The General headed immediately towards Metalhead, a newly christened ARC trooper who had lingered, obviously hoping that the Jedi would scoop him up. Rex had heard other troopers whisper that Metalhead had gotten his name by pulling the heads off ten clankers with his bare hands in a blind rage during a training run on Kamino. But that was probably just a rumor; though Metalhead was a recent addition to the group, Rex knew him as a quiet, soft-spoken man and an able marksman. There was something about that curious silence, though, that Rex distrusted.

Rex himself chose troopers Spot, Licker, Pick, and Constant to join his squad; all able, all battle-hardened and loyal. Licker had the best tracking skills of anyone in the 501st, Rex included. The rest were good shots with sharp eyes.

They took off into the wilderness a few hours later, clad in their lightest gear and their strongest boots. Fog coated the planet like a mirage, turning the world a shade of shimmering blue. Occasionally the song of some unnamed bird would roll upwards with the wind, sad and sweet and somewhat familiar. Rex found himself relaxing. He was reminded of a song he’d heard when he was a child on Kamino: _Snow is sweet and hail is bitter, sour is the coming winter…_

They searched the entire area around the Borum camp (much to the Borum’s dismay) and found nothing, so they journeyed deeper and deeper into the vast woods, keeping constant contact with other squads. They’d nearly spent the whole day searching before Licker stopped quite suddenly and knelt, studying something beneath his feet.

“Captain, I’ve found something,” Licker remarked. “Human footprints, clone boots -- fresh, too, by the look of them. Maybe twenty minutes old.”

Rex knelt and squinted at the faint depression of a foot in the mud. “Are you really sure they would have come out this far?”

“Well, it wasn’t a _them,_ sir. This clone appears to have been traveling alone.”

A chill went up Rex’s spine. Wandering lost through a forest in a group was one thing, alone another. He wondered with a slight thrill of fear what had forced the group apart.

The footprints stretched for long miles ahead. Whoever this trooper was, he always seemed to be ahead of them. The men began to grumble amongst themselves; the light was starting to grow dim, and the day appeared to be drawing to a close. They hadn’t packed any provisions, meaning to make their march a quick one, an action that Rex sorely regretted now. They were all starving and bone tired, but the trooper was so _close,_ and surely he must tire soon, they all told themselves.

The prints stretched on.

They found their first clanker forty minutes in. They all quickly pulled their blasters from their hips and surrounded it, but the droid was obviously no threat; it sat, depowered, its curved battle-droid shell pitched forward as if it were in the middle of some peaceful afternoon nap. Spot approached it warily. “No blaster marks,” he commented. “Nothing appears to be out of place.”

“Weird,” Pick murmured. The rest agreed in silence.

Spot stepped forward and cupped the battle droid’s head in his hands. He motioned for his brothers to give him a hand, and he, Pick, and Constant give an almighty yank; sure enough, the part sprung free from its metal neck. “Anyone got a screwdriver?” he asked. Rex took his pack off his back and riffled through its contents until his hands fell upon the cool touch of metal; he handed it up to Spot, who accepted it with a “Thank you, Captain.” Spot pried the battle droid’s skull apart carefully until it popped open in a burst of colored wires. He nudged through them with the butt end of his screwdriver, his eyes flicking wildly from wire to wire, appearing to search for something, anything.

“Things look normal inside,” he declared. “I mean, I’m no Geonosian, but I don’t see any evidence of a virus or tampering. And look, his fuel cell’s still half-charged. He still had a few weeks of power left in him. If I had a monitor in front of me I could tell you more, but… It looks like this droid deactivated himself.”

“What do you mean, he just sat down and died?” Rex asked, aghast.

“It appears to be a suicide, sir.” Spot took the droid’s head in his hands. He stood. “Do you mind if I keep this, Captain? I want to run some more tests.”

Rex looked down at the droid. Its depowered eyes were strangely unsettling to him, as if by sputtering out the light had been sucked from its soul. “Be my guest,” he said.

Spot clipped the droid’s head to his belt. It bounced and stared at Rex with its dead eyes. _Droids don’t just power themselves off,_ he thought, wondering. It was against their prime directive to do so: kill the enemy until you’re spare parts yourself, and sometimes even after.

More began to pop up along the path as they walked, all perfectly, horribly intact. All of them appeared to have been there for a while; some had begun to rust, and many more had swampgrass growing between their joints and mushrooms through their eyes. Bunches appeared, then dozens, lying empty in the curdled sap and mud.

But suddenly, it began to turn.

They found a droid with its arm ripped off, floating aimlessly in a short pond. They found another with missing feet. Still another had been ripped apart at the waist where its wires sat still and quivering like slimed intestines. Here the trooper’s footprints grew wild, Licker insisted, darting in frantic circles.

“You think he did this?” Rex asked.

“No, Captain, those droids have obviously been here for a while,” the trooper mused. “These tracks are new.”

“Then what could have done this?”

“I don’t know, sir. Maybe an animal.”

They passed a droid with its wires pulled from its scalp to its “mouth,” hanging there in jagged red teeth. Rex was no Jedi, but he could tell that whatever had done this had done it in a blind rage.

Night had fallen when the trees finally began to thin and the dome structure of a Separatist base rose into view. The base was short and squat, rising from the dirt like a metal mushroom through the ever-present mist. The ground around it was littered with the remains of hundreds of droids: a foot here, a hand there, dozens of bodies flung about like leaves in the wind.

The troopers’ helmet-lights spilled crescents of white onto the scene, bringing the dismantled droids into pale focus. “Alright, let’s move in,” Rex commanded, almost whispering, his hand already on his holster (the rest mirrored the gesture), “Blasters ready. Be careful. I wouldn’t want to piss off whatever did _that._ ” His men nodded.

Rex felt a little better moving with a DC-15 in his hands. There was a sick sort of comfort in looking at the world down the barrel of your own gun, Rex reflected. The ragged bits of enemies rose as twisted blue shadows in the mist, looking for all the world like the hands and feet of a lost people clawing their way from the blurred dirt. Fog pressed cool sweat into his skin as he walked, scanning blindly for things with claws and teeth and hate.

The gates to the Separatist base were unlocked. Their footsteps echoed off the sloping metal walls. The lights flickered off and on in turn, making shadows wax and wane in desperate cycles all around them. Rex stepped on the rusted remains of a droid’s skull. The men bent closer into the sights of their blasters.

There was a faint sound coming from the left corner. Rex froze. He turned back to his men, tilting his head slightly, indicating them to follow. Rex’s heart thudded in his chest as he came closer and closer to the sound, which grew loud enough for him to realize that it was the sound of his own breathing, ragged and sharp and wild-

Their lights fell upon the outline of something that was huddled, panting, against the wall, clad in armor that was cracked and smeared with mud. It was very thin, only a bundle of skin and bones. The thing rocked slowly back and forth, shielding itself from the light. It whimpered.

“It’s a trooper,” Spot said in a hush.

Rex stepped forward, his heartbeat hammering in his ears. “Trooper, identify yourself,” he commanded, but his throat grew suddenly very dry. The way the trooper was rocking made him seem like one of the thousands of refugee children Rex had transported on rescue missions with the 501st. He had that same desperate look in his eye, as if he were lost and alone and afraid. Rex’s heart wrenched in sudden pity. “Trooper, what is your number?” he repeated, more gently.

The trooper finally turned and looked into the light. Drool dripped from his gaping mouth. “... _captain…_ ” he whispered. The word was a gasp of agony.

“Trooper?” Rex knelt down beside the man. His eyes quivered and rolled in their sockets, but Rex thought he saw something in them.

Recognition.

“Trooper, who are you?” Rex said softly.

“ _Hostile…_ ” the man gasped. “General called me _Hostile…_ ”

Rex looked closely at the man and knew for certain that he couldn’t be Tails, Cutter, or Spare. He looked at the smudged sigil on the trooper’s breastplate.

“General Helcorru?” Rex guessed, once again gently. “Did General Helcorru call you that?”

 _“Yes…_ Mother _took_ him from me…” Tears spilled down Hostile’s face.

“Did you take apart those clankers?” Spot asked, still standing at a wary distance.

Hostile’s mouth tightened into a snarl. “Good soldiers follow orders,” he growled, “Good soldiers follow orders, Captain, _good soldiers._ ” His eyes were wild with hate. “I killed them, I ripped them apart with my own hands and they _burned_ me.” He lifted his hands and showed them the rips and burns crossing his skin in the shape of molten wires, turning his fingers black and rotted and pocked with bleeding sores. “I did it for the Republic, I followed orders, I did,” he pleaded, grasping at Rex’s arms with those same blackened hands. Rex tried to wrench back, but the trooper’s grip was strong. “Captain, I killed them all, I _saved_ us, I saved our brothers.”

Rex tried to pull his arm back, bile rising in his throat. Drops of drool dripped from Hostile’s mouth as he ranted and roared and pleaded with his mad eyes so full of hate. Rex’s heart screamed in his ears, and his breaths grew shorter and he only knew he had to get _out,_ and he yelled, “Trooper, let _go_ \--”

A shot echoed through the room. Hostile’s grip slackened as he looked about in sudden surprise. His eyes narrowed to slits. _“Traitors,_ ” he snarled. “Droids. Clanker scum. You aren’t really clones are you, you’re more Seppies come to kill me--”

“No, Hostile, no, listen to me,” Rex assured him, waving his hands in a desperate gesture to _calm down, stay back._ “Listen, trooper, you need help. We’re just going to take you back to our base. Our medics are a good sort, they’ll put you right, they’ll help you.” He was babbling now, but he couldn’t seem to stop.

“ _No!_ ” Hostile hissed. He pulled his blaster from his belt in a flash. “No, get away from me. I’m a good soldier, I follow orders, I’ll _always_ follow orders--” He let out a shot. A cry rang out through the darkness. Rex whirled and saw Licker collapse to the ground, clutching his leg. He saw Pick’s face twist into a mask of rage, and saw him level his blaster and _fire_.

A bolt of red light slammed into Hostile’s head. He was dead before he hit the floor.

Rex rounded on Pick. “What were you thinking?” he bellowed. “We could have gotten more information from him! He might’ve known what happened to Helcorru!”

“He tried to kill Licker!” Pick exclaimed.

“He didn’t know what he was doing--”

“Exactly. He could have killed us all,” Pick retorted. “Captain,” he added contemptuously.

Licker let out a very long, very loud groan. “Give it a rest, Pick,” he said through gritted teeth, still clutching at his wounded leg. “It’s over. With all due respect, Captain, it’s done.”

A sudden thought whipped through Rex’s head-

 _(I should have him court martialed for this)_

-but he shrugged it away. Hostile had shot first, and nearly killed a man; Pick had every reason to fire.

Still, the walk back to the rendezvous point was an awkward one. It didn’t help that they were doing it in the pitch dark, knee deep in mud and sap that stuck to their armor and never came unstuck. _Miserable_ was the best way to describe it, Rex thought. Absolutely miserable.

The General’s squad was looking considerably better than they were when they finally met up. Most of Metalhead’s troopers were laughing and trading stories amongst themselves, all except Metalhead himself, who only stood and watched the perimeter in silence.

The General came over to Rex’s squad at once. “What happened?” he demanded. Rex saw his eyes sweep over Licker, who was limping forward with arms slung around Pick and Spot’s necks. “Did you find the Separatists?”

“We did,” Rex confirmed gravely. “We found them ripped up in scrap heaps.”

“What?”

“I’ll explain everything, if you can get us a moment alone.” The General said a few words to Metalhead, and the order was passed amongst the clones. They walked a little ways into the trees until they were sure that they could speak unheard.

When Rex had finished telling his tale, the General seemed to stop and think for a moment, stroking at his chin in a way that reminded Rex eerily of Obi-Wan Kenobi. “It takes a lot of force to rip apart a droid,” the General said finally. “I’ve never heard of any human that can do it with their bare hands. It would take incredible strength. And you tell me this trooper looked half-starved.”

“It may be an effect of the sap,” Rex ventured. “He did mention a mother… Maybe the Borum gave him some of this sap. Maybe it made him into what he was when we found him.” He shivered. “The sap could have made him stronger. I’ve heard of spice sold on Coruscant that can make a madman strong enough to lift a Gundark. I only wish I could remember what happened when we tried it.”

“Yeah.” The corners of the General’s mouth turned down. “Me too.”

 _He’s hiding something,_ Rex realized. He didn’t like that.

“Did you find the bomb?”

 _What?_ Rex thought blankly. He’d completely forgotten about the supposed bomb Windu had said the Separatists were building on Mukkoth so long ago. _Oh, right._ “We searched the building. We didn’t find anything except for dead droids. It wasn’t big enough to be a complex.”

“We should still check it out. Let’s go.” The General turned and started back. It was an abrupt end to the conversation, but then again, he wasn’t known for his politeness or his patience.

Rex studied the General. _What does he know about that night?_ he wondered. _What is he trying so hard to hide?_ He resolved to keep a closer eye on him in the future. _For his own good,_ he told himself, and his heart twisted with guilt.

* * *

The 501st descended on the Separatist base like a swarm of hesitant bees. The broken droids cast grisly shapes in the mist, giving the base the look of a metal graveyard. Anakin kept finding more bits of them, stepping on torn-out eyes and fingers and power cells that still flickered faintly under layers of blue.

“This bastard was busy,” Anakin heard one clone say to another.

The inside of the base was indeed small; it held nothing but trim rows of monitors and whatever was left of the droids that had “manned” them, as the ironic saying went. Hostile was slumped in a corner. Rex had been right; the trooper was nothing but skin and bones clad in smeared armor. Anakin couldn’t believe that a half-starved man could rip apart one droid, let alone a hundred, until he noticed his hands. The palms were crossed with electric burns and sores that bled black. His brains were splattered across the walls in fans of gray and red. Anakin reached into the Force and found the cold echoes of hatred hovering around the corpse. Rex’s story checked out. Not that Anakin ever had any reason to doubt him.

Something glinted behind Hostile’s back. Anakin knelt and, grimacing, pulled something metal from a pack Hostile had clipped to his side. It was a disk a few centimeters wide, small enough that Anakin could hold it in his hand. Anakin shook it gently, and the ghostly blue form of none other than Helcorru lit up above its surface.

Rex came to his side. “What have you got there, General?” he asked.

Helcorru began to speak. _“Log Number One: The first night of many. We landed on the surface today. The wilderness is wild and unsuitable for landing large vessels; we were forced to leave the_ Ambition _and descend to the surface in smaller craft. It was quite the lengthy undertaking. Presently, the men have begun to set up camp. I think my men don’t like the look of this planet, specifically the foreboding fog that covers the surface... I’ve already heard some swapping strange tales about ghosts and monsters in the mess hall, wild nonsense. Still, there’s something about this place…_ ”

Anakin paused the recording. “It’s a Holodiary,” he said.

Rex chuckled. “You think?”

Anakin fast forwarded through the footage until the last entry, then hit _Continue_.

 _“Log Number… Log Number… Stars, for the life of me I can’t remember._ ” Helcorru’s tongue flicked nervously between his lips, tracing the bumps of his scales in haphazard circles. _“Has it really been so long since we first landed? I swear I can’t even remember that, it’s like some odd dream. I can’t even think of why we came here. That’s my problem, I can’t_ think, _I can’t think of anything at all with her voice in my head.”_ He sighed and swept a clawed hand over his eyes. He looked exhausted. _This is going to be my last entry. After I’m finished, I’m going to send this diary to the Republic, where hopefully it will land in the right hands. I’m sending a team to look for a Separatist vessel. It won’t have breathable air -- droids don’t need oxygen, after all -- but it’s our last hope. The_ Ambition _is destroyed, apparently on my orders. I don’t understand how that could be, but the few men that remain to me tell me that it is true. I’m beginning to think they were right. I’m going mad. I can’t think, dammit, I can’t-_ -” Helcorru straightened abruptly. He stared blankly past the camera, completely, utterly still. He appeared to be listening.

The hologram ended.

Anakin and Rex exchanged looks. Neither knew quite what to say.

“The clones weren’t committing mutiny,” Rex said finally, once he’d mused for a while. “They blew up the _Ambition_ on his orders.” He seemed shocked at the very idea.

“Who do you think this ‘her’ is? It might be this ‘Mother’ we’ve been hearing about,” Anakin wondered aloud.

“Possibly. He does appear to be under the influence of something,” Rex agreed. “But what I’m wondering is how Hostile got this in the first place.”

Anakin thought on this for a while, but something had been gnawing at him ever since he first stepped foot in this place. “Well, I’ve been thinking about this base,” he began tentatively, gesturing around them. “Why did the Separatists decide to build such a small base all the way out here? This whole place looks like it should be next to a larger complex, a command center of some sort. Why is it out here all on its own? Where’s the complex?”

Rex sighed. “Do you really want to find out?”


	6. Chapter 6

Anakin couldn’t sleep. He just couldn’t.

Thoughts flew through his mind like bits of jagged glass cast to the wind, stinging, painful.

_(my fault)_

_….every single one of them..._

_(Ahsoka)_

The walls of his tent billowed and sighed with the wind, which seemed to be rising as Anakin sat and listened to the whine of it grow higher and higher until it wailed.

The walls jerked inwards, as if the air had suddenly been sucked from the room.

The wind stopped.

Silence.

_(To think I called you MASTER)_

Thunder ripped through the quiet. Anakin jerked, then stilled, then curled up, shivering, on his bedroll. Raindrops beat louder and louder against the canvas like war drums approaching from the distance, summoning the sluggish shape of some army approaching from the horizon in a smear of shadow. Anakin tried to slip away into the Force but he couldn’t seem to grasp it, all he could hear was his own breaths frayed at the edges, sharp and hitching in his throat and threatening to build into crescendo.

_(we killed her slowly)_

Anakin reached into the Force again and this time he managed to gather it in his hands but it felt like pure agony tearing into his skin, sharp and jagged and black. The more he felt it, the more the pain mounted and the more he felt his hate growing like bile at the back of his throat, smooth and perfect and oh, so cold.

And then-

He was standing. He was standing on polished marble, looking up at long columns that stretched into a long domed hallway, shining and smooth.

 _The Jedi Temple,_ Anakin realized with a shock. _I’m home._ But the Temple was different; the more Anakin walked, the more he started to notice the cracks in the walls, the sounds of rock crumbling from the Temple’s ancient facade onto level ground thousands of miles below. He watched in horrid fascination as a crack spiderwebbed in front of him, then collapsed in on itself, ripping itself away to reveal the view of Coruscant’s spires rising in elegant twists on the horizon, touched by the gold of Coruscant’s setting sun and the pale glow of its four moons like faded eyes watching the destruction with cold disinterest.

_(Ani.)_

Padme’s voice. The Force rippled past him in a wave, pushing him forward.

I’m not supposed to see this, Anakin thought. There was something vaguely wrong about the way the Force had suddenly _shifted_ around him, as if space were bending past and through this place.

_(Ani, I’m pregnant.)_

_“That’s… That’s wonderful.”_ That was his voice, Anakin realized. He craned his head up and looked at the arches that sailed gracefully above him, watching as the rock crashed through, piece by piece revealing the white fire of the stars. The voice seemed to be coming from up above, but then it was to his left, his right, brushing up against his ear with sudden pressure like lips pressed against his skin.

He stepped on something. It was small and round and painfully familiar. Anakin bent down and saw with sudden inexplicable horror that it was a lightsaber, cracked and rusted with age, and attached to it-

Attached to it was a youngling’s small hand, sliced off at the wrist. A clean, laser-precise cut.

He heard Obi-Wan saying: 

_(Who could have done this?)_

The echoes of grief seeped from the walls in waves, making Anakin rack and shudder. Just a dream, he told himself, it’s just a dream, wake up, come on, wake _up…_

 _Isn’t it wonderful?_ Padme appeared in front of him; she wasn’t there, and then she was, and it was like she’d always been there, smiling. Her right hand rested on her belly, huge and swollen with life. She glowed.

“...Padme…” Anakin cried, “Get away…”

Small bodies littered the floor at his feet but Anakin walked with his head up, trying to ignore the dark shapes crowding around his feet.

Padme took him in his arms. She was beautiful. Her hair cascaded in dark, perfect curls down her back, smooth and glossy and warm. Her body was bent forward with a certain grace under the weight of her stomach, like a dancer taking a final bow.

Lightning flashed in the distance. Shadows danced across her face. Anakin took it in his hands and traced her jaw with wondering hands. It had been so long, so _long_ and he wanted to know every inch of her was here with him, that this wasn’t just a dream anymore. She worked her hands around his neck and pulled him to her and they kissed, long and slow and sweet.

Anakin felt a sudden wetness press against him. He stepped back. Dark stains were spreading beneath Padme’s breasts, dark and thick and the color of blood against her red senator’s garb. Lightning flashed again; in its blaze, she was white as a corpse.

In slow, fluid motions she tugged down her sleeves and let her clothes fall in a heap at her feet. Her breasts were weeping blue milk in thin, clotted streams like tears. Anakin’s breath hitched in his throat. He couldn’t seem to move. She stepped forward once again and brought her lips to his in a lingering kiss.

 _Every single one of them,_ she whispered. Her stomach pressed against his and Anakin could feel the small heartbeat within flickering in and out in the Force. Its signature was growing more faint with each second.

“Padme,” Anakin gasped, “The child…!”

Thick black blood coursed in streams down her legs.

_(No no it can’t be, Obi-Wan whispered)_

There was another voice, one Anakin couldn’t recognize: _The power to cheat death, only one has achieved…_

Padme looked up at him again, and this time her eyes were huge and fearful. _Help me, Ani,_ she whispered. _Find me. Before it’s too late. I need you… My children need you…_

And suddenly Anakin could sense the presence of men, dozens of them, a trooper’s voice crying _Mother_ and _it’s sweet, hail is bitter..._

Anakin’s head spun. It was too much, too much for anyone to handle, he thought desperately, and he wanted to go but he couldn’t seem to move an inch. Padme’s arms reached for him again. Lightning flashed, and Anakin saw that they were covered in black blood, but in the light it looked startlingly blue against her marble-white skin. Milk leaked from her breasts. Despite it all, Anakin’s mouth watered.

 _Hate for me, child,_ Mother -- no, Padme, where had that thought come from, Anakin thought wildly -- cried, smiling her lovely smile. _Give me your power._ And then Anakin’s feet came unstuck and he was running, and the rocks were falling down all around him and the temple was collapsing and thunder was splitting through his skull in a massive _BOOM_ that shook the earth and-

Anakin was stumbling out of his tent, gasping for breath. He looked up at the sky. The Force seemed to whisper _something is wrong._

“General!” Rex was running towards him in a blind panic. He shoved a telescope into his hands. “General, something’s happened!”

Anakin put the telescope in his eye and angled upwards, searching through the stars. His heart stopped.

In the distance, the _Perseverance_ was burning.


	7. Chapter 7

Spare licked the last traces of sap from his lips. He longed for more, but they needed to keep moving, and the closer they got to Mother, the more his mind and his body belonged to her and told him that this was _right._ Men weren’t meant to live without a mother, it was unnatural, it was sickening, and it was what the Republic had done to millions on Kamino. Spare’s hatred burned in his chest like blaster fire, red and rotting. He’d never known such hate before he met his Mother, but now he craved it. He was addicted to the feeling like he was addicted to the dripping blue falling in agonizingly perfect waves all around him.

Spare reached toward the trees again, but stopped himself. His mind needed to be clear. They were only a few klicks away from Mother, he thought; her voice had never been so loud in his head.

 _Snow is sweet… sweet… sweet…_ she whispered in a pulse that beat in time with Spare’s footsteps. He stopped. They had reached the mouth of a great cave stretching into blackness. He looked at his brothers. Cutter was studying it with religious fervor; Nerves was muttering something under his breath-

Mother seemed to catch the thought and brought it to him: _(dam Seppies... sweet… sweet… hail is bitter… kill them...)_

Tails was smiling, his eyes empty and vacant. He licked his lips. The rest did the same in perfect, unplanned sync. Their minds were one with Mother, and one with each other; Mother had bound them that night in the forest, when they had tasted her seed. The clones didn’t talk anymore; they communicated in brief impulses that passed between them in rhythmic beats, feelings where words would have been. They had even briefly picked up a signal from the General - Ani, Mother had called him Ani in the darkness, Spare knew suddenly - flashes of bodies stacked on the floor, something under a white sheet.

Now, a pulse of agreement echoed through them. Their hate and their love pushed them forward in a single synchronized movement into the lair of the Mother-beast.

They found her surrounded by dead brothers, pale and rotting corpses, dusted bones. She had no face; instead, she had countless nipples that dotted gray, swelling flesh and oozed milk between them, milk that the mother invited them to drink, which they did eagerly.

After a fashion, the Mother bid them to step back; they did so, but with a great, rolling disappointment. Drinking from the mother had been intoxicating, so pleasurable Spare thought he might have burst from that _feeling,_ so soft and warm, that feeling that he was never alone, that he was loved.

Mother had a mission for them, she said, a very important one. They listened. They left.

Spare urged Tails to his side with a sudden twist of his mind, just as Cutter brought Nerves to him. They split away from each other, Cutter and Nerves towards base camp, Spare and Tails towards the Separatist base that Mother had shown them, guiding their path forward.

They found it filled with disabled droids, untouched, lying blindly in piles. Mother had disliked them, with their strange metal thoughts and minds and their numbing electronic chatter, so she had cut it off long ago. The base was quite big, curved in a long egg shape in typical Separatist flair. They walked along its long halls until they found what Mother had shown them: a bomb, flickering and pulsing in cycles of blue energy that scattered light across the walls. It was only a few inches long, in a thin, oblong tube shape that Spare seized and put in the pack strapped about his waist.

They searched for a while until they found the Separatist hangar and, recalling their training on Kamino, they boarded one of the ships, strapping rebreathers to their mouths. The ship wouldn’t have breathable air, but it would serve their purposes. Mother had gotten the idea from the Jedi that was now nothing more than picked bones at her feet, a risky one, she admitted, but then her children were bold, were they not?

 _Yes,_ Spare and Tails thrummed. _We are bold._

The ship jolted and jumped into the atmosphere with sudden ferocity, jerking them back. It carried them up and up and up until their window was smeared with stars. They floated there for a while, looking down at the sheer beauty of the planet, covered in green and blue and twisting swirls of cloud beneath them. It was Mother. It was Home.

Tears pricked in Spare’s eyes. He would never see it again.

He pushed the ship forward, ever vigilant. He would see this through. For Mother.

The _Perseverance_ rose before them, a metal monolith in space. Spare activated the comms, punching in the access codes. _“Perseverance,_ do you read me?” he said.

There was a blast of fuzz on the other side. “We read you,” a trooper’s voice replied warily. “What’s your identification?”

“CT-6783, here with CT-9005,” Spare confirmed.

There was a brief pause. Then, the voice on the other side chuckled. “What’s with the Seppie ship?”

“We ran into some trouble,” Spare said. The explanation was vague, but then again, under General Skywalker, _trouble_ was always expected. He knew the troopers wouldn’t question it, especially if it was coming from one of their own.

Sure enough, they were given the go-ahead to land. Spare and Tails immediately took off in sync into the depths of the ship they’d crossed through top-to-bottom a thousand times in their careers. It didn’t take them long to reach the main reactor. Spare reached into his pack and pulled out that long, thin cylinder. It was oddly cool to the touch. He placed it on the reactor and twisted it the way Mother had shown them, clockwise once, counterclockwise twice. A thin beeping issued from the device.

Tails and Spare sat as one, crossing their legs beneath them. They waited.

When the explosion came, they thought only of Mother.

* * *

Cutter and Nerves walked a different path. They crept, silent and still, for days, their bodies aching for food, stuffing themselves with sap. It didn’t help much, but it did bring Mother closer to them, and that was good, they agreed. The mud sucked listlessly at their feet, and once it rained, and they could hear the General speak. They heard _every single one of them_ and didn’t know what it meant, but it was good.

They approached the camp perimeter, bruised and wet and starving. The woods were not always kind to them, but Mother had still tried her best, and they loved her for it.

The trooper on lookout was Builder, a strong, well-muscled man that had once been a friend to Nerves.

“Nerves!” Builder exclaimed. “It’s so good to see you, I thought the worst-”

Nerves leveled his blaster and fired. The shot hit its mark; Builder fell to the ground, dead. The troopers walked over his body without even looking at it, straight into the ammunition shed beyond. Once inside, they grabbed all of the bombs they could carry.

The bombs jostled and bumped in their arms, but the troopers were not afraid. They were past fear now, and only thought of Mother. They found the shipyard ahead crawling with troopers; that was alright, they thought, it was okay, they weren’t expecting anything. And indeed not a soul said anything as two clones clad in smeared armor walked from ship to ship, supposedly inspecting them but secretly attaching bombs to each, licking their lips and thinking of clotted milk.

They sat and watched as their brothers had, legs crossed beneath them, staring blankly up at the twisted metal that surrounded them.

A trooper walked over. “Wait a minute, what are you doing-”

And then the fire came, and it was done.

The 501st was never going to leave Mukkoth.

Not if Mother had anything to say about it.


	8. Chapter 8

All Rex could do was stare.

Chunks of the _Perseverance_ rained down in bits of fire, shaking the dirt beneath his feet. He swayed; he grabbed desperately onto the pole of some tent, unknowing, uncaring of where he was, his mind crashing down with the ship. Screams echoed in his ears from someplace far away.

Someone was tugging his shoulder. _Captain,_ a trooper was saying, and his voice was muffled, as if he was speaking underwater; _Captain, it’s not safe here, we have to go, Captain…_

A high whine rang through his ears, and all Rex could hear was the dim sound of his own breathing, mounting hot and rough in his chest--

“Captain!”

Rex snapped out of a daze. He turned to look at the trooper. _Constant,_ he thought suddenly. Constant was pushing him forwards with grim determination in his eyes.

“The General…” Rex gasped. “Where’s the General?” He scanned the camp wildly, but he was nowhere to be seen.

“Captain, don’t worry, he’s off with a squadron already,” Constant reassured him, “Now, please, sir, we’ve got to _go-_ ”

“Right, right. Hands off.” He shook off Constant’s hand rudely, already feeling a rush of embarrassment coming on. What were his men going to think if he froze in front of a little fire? He ran desperately into the forest, watching the retreating backs of his troopers, flashing white in the tangled darkness. Constant was behind him, shouting for him to go _this way_ and Rex burst into the wide mouth of a cave, panting hard, steadying himself against a cool, solid wall.

It wasn’t a moment too soon; Rex shouted for a pair of binoculars, and watched in horror as a piece of durasteel as big as a Seppie assault tank smashed into the barracks. He put them down and let out a curse that would have made a Corellian deckhand wince.

“Captain! Captain, what’s going on-”

Rex turned and noticed the faint white shapes of squadrons coming towards him from the shadows. _Who could have done this?_ They asked, in ten, twenty different voices. _Why? How?_

_If only I knew._

The General emerged from the crowd, yelling for the troopers to settle down, be quiet. Rex felt a great surge of relief upon seeing him. He hurriedly pulled him aside, asking, “General, do you have any idea of what’s going on?”

The General looked pale. “No,” he admitted. “I was hoping you knew something.” He let out a shaky half-smile.

“Sorry, I know just about as much as you do.” Rex sighed. “Who could have done this?” he wondered, echoing his men.

The General’s hand tightened on his lightsaber, and Rex saw a spasm of rage flick across his face. “A traitor,” he said. “I’ve got men already looking through the ranks to see if anyone’s missing, though it’s hard in the confusion; we’ll know more tomorrow. And Metalhead’s trying to send a message to the Republic.”

A wave of despair passed through him. To think that one of his own men could have done this… Rex suddenly felt very tired, and for all the galaxy just wanted to sit down. A thought crossed through his mind, a thought that made sudden horrible sense. “General, we do know a few men that have gone missing. They’ve been missing for days now. I hate to even suggest it, but…”

The General frowned. “I hope you’re wrong about this, Rex.”

Rex sighed again. “Me too.”

* * *

The next day, when they returned to the camp, they found it in ruins. Only one trooper had died, thank the stars, but a couple more had been injured in their frantic run into the cave. Luckily, the ammunition bunker and the shipyard were untouched, along with over half of the tents. Still, the 501st had taken a heavy loss; the barracks were completely smashed into a pile of steaming rubble, and bits of jagged metal were everywhere, ripping at their boots and ankles. Three-quarters of their provisions were gone. And, mysteriously, nobody could seem to get a signal out to the Republic; even the General’s electronic genius failed him as he fidgeted with three transmitters and could get none of them to let out a signal, even though they were untouched.

The clones began to whisper of a curse. Morale was the lowest Rex had ever seen; there was no more laughing or joking in the 501st anymore, only nods and long, strained silences.

The General took it the worst. He walked like a ghost through the wreckage, pale and silent, fidgeting with his durasteel fingers as if he was trying to grasp at something, anything to hold on to. He spent most of his days like that, staring in wordless shock into the mist, moving as if in a trance. Something else had happened to him that night, Rex knew somehow. Something that had shaken him to his core.

Then the second explosion came.

Rex was standing over a holotable in their new makeshift command tent when he heard the _boom_ and felt the heat sweep over him. _Not again,_ he thought.

He could only stare wordlessly once again as he saw his shipyard up in flames. The flames had an eerie kind of beauty to them, Rex thought, as it veiled the dead from the sight of the living, curling and snapping in twists of orange and yellow and red like the shining gems of the richest shroud. Smoke danced above it all, twirling freely in the mist.

When the fire died, ten men were dead. None of the ships could be salvaged.

Two of the bodies were positively ID’d as Cutter and Nerves. 

They held a ceremony for the dead the next night. The men spent a day digging a burial pit, as was custom during these times. The men were covered in makeshift shrouds of ripped tent canvas, tied at their feet with a length of string. They laid eight of them in a single straight row. Cutter and Nerves were buried in a separate, hastily dug pit. Many of the men were hesitant to even touch them; per clone tradition, it was bad luck to touch a traitor’s corpse, as if their guilt could spread. It was a stupid superstition, but not one that Rex dared push against now. 

Rex led the service above the loyal eight, reading the Words of the Dead, an unofficial clone tradition. He’d done it a few times before, so he read steadily, and did not stumble. “These were good men,” he said, “Good soldiers, good friends, good brothers. They served the Republic with bravery and strength. They laid down their lives for us. And now they rest.”

“And now they rest,” the 501st echoed. Rex heard a few sniffles.

“We must honor their sacrifice with sacrifices of our own. We must continue to push forward in the name of peace and democracy. We must bring honor to their names. And now we must bury them.” He nodded towards Bushel, who stood near the edge of the pit with a shovel. There were tears streaming down his face. He’d been close with Builder, a clone that they had found with a blaster wound beneath all of his burns. Bushel plunged his shovel into the dirt and threw the first load of dirt below. He began to sob.

The General, standing to the right of Rex, turned away. He was shaking. “I need to go,” he said abruptly, and stalked off into the forest in one of his trances.

Murmuring erupted behind him, and for once, Rex was wont to agree with it. The General couldn’t leave at a time like this, he thought angrily, he just couldn’t, it wasn’t _right._

_I’ll leave him with his trees,_ Rex fumed. He grabbed a shovel and began to throw dirt into the grave.

* * *

Anakin walked alone into the forest, fidgeting with his durasteel hand. _I shouldn’t have left,_ he thought. The clones were going to be angry. _Screw them and what they think, I need this, I_ need _it._

Anakin took a comm pad from his pocket, set it on a stump, and dialed.

It rang once, twice, three times. _Come on, you stupid thing, work, work-_

Padme’s face swam into view, spinning in and out of focus. “Ani-” she said, but her voice cut out, stuttering with interference. “What… I’m… here, but…” The hologram winked out completely.

Anakin roared and swung the comm forward in a rage. It broke open in a spray of wires and was immediately swallowed by a rushing drip of sap; the wires sparked, smoked, and died, covered in blue.

 _Dammit,_ Anakin thought, _Kriffing dammit, I’m such an idiot._ His heart pounded in his chest and anger and fear bucked within him in turns, making his hands clench into solid fists. 

A thought brushed past him in the Force-

_(every single one)_

-and Anakin bolted to his feet, igniting his lightsaber. “Who’s there?” he called. He gripped the hilt fiercely. “Now is _not_ the time to be playing jokes, trooper, I’m starting to get angry-”

_(...good…)_

The word seemed to stretch the length of black holes, long and dripping with glee. Anakin swung into a Shien ready stance, groping blindly through the Force. A current of the Dark Side seemed to be swirling all around him, cold and yet excruciatingly hot as he stretched forward to meet it. “Who are you?” he asked uneasily. He looked forward, but there was nothing there but mist. He took a hesitant step forward, gripping his lightsaber in both hands. Could it be Dooku? Or perhaps the master that was rumored to stand behind the apprentice, that shadowy figure called Sidious?

 _(...I can_ feel _your anger…)_ The voice was oddly familiar, but Anakin couldn’t seem to place it. Anakin was forced to throw himself into the current, searching for a face, for a name.

_(sit down)_

Anakin sat. He could barely feel his legs folding beneath him, he was so absorbed in this strange, shifting stream of darkness. His lightsaber dropped, deactivated, from his hands.

_(look)_

Anakin’s vision tunneled. He found himself looking with sudden intensity at the sap that poured like curdled blood down the black stalks of the trees. His mouth watered; he stretched out with his left hand, his human hand, and let it pool into his palm.

_(Drink.)_

Anakin lifted it to his lips, licking them in anticipation-

“No!” Anakin cried. He wiped his hand on his pants. _Stars,_ he thought. _I’m going insane._


	9. Chapter 9

It had been three days since Bushel had last tasted water.

Blue milk runs down his chin, cold, wet, perfect. He swipes at it with a finger and lifts it again to his lips, groaning with pleasure. The groan is echoed by the deep aches in his stomach, reminding him insistently that the last time he’d eaten had been a long time before the last time he’d drunk water.

He hadn’t slept for weeks, either. But with Mother, that went without saying. On the sap, real life was a deep sleep smeared with dreams. Days bled into nights in rolls of gray fog. And through it all there was the ache in his chest, the constant pain that reminded him with each sharp beat of his heart that Builder was _dead… dead… dead…_

Builder, his best friend. His only friend. Killed, in the great cosmic irony, by one of his own brothers. _Avenge me,_ Builder whispers, day in, day out. _Hate for me._ Bushel knows these are Mother’s words, but they are sweet, and he holds them close.

 _Sour is the coming winter… Lonesome is the shivering rain…_ He sings the words to himself, trembling. The rain comes all at once in silver sheets, plucking cold, dissonant notes on his skin. He bundles into himself, rocking back and forth like a child scared by thunder. _Mother,_ he cries. _Mother. Save me. I am so small, and the rain is so much more._

With the rain come the impulses of his brothers, flowing in their steady stream of thoughts and snarling emotion. They cry out for food, for water, but One-Eye the Cook knows that there is none, and Bushel feels the echoes of the gun that he presses against his forehead as if it is pressed against his own, and hundreds of voices scream as one as he pulls the trigger, and then the only impulse is blackness.

 _Weakness,_ Mother spits.

“Traitor,” Builder snarls. Bushel looks at him and _wails_. He forces his fingers into his mouth to stop the horrible sound that is coming from his own throat, and sucking on them he tastes the filth and the sweetness of sap. “Coward.”

“He was my friend…”

“A traitor killed me, Bushel. Tell me you remember that.”

“I remember.” Bushel’s breath is sandpaper in his throat. “Yes, I remember, now please… _leave…_ ” A sob pushes knives into his windpipe. He bits down on his fingers, hard, and tastes warm blood.

 _Avenge me,_ Builder hisses. _Hate for me._

The rain stops and comes again. Bushel drinks the sap. He starves. Thin and shaking, he goes on his hands and knees and begins to crawl to Mother.

He is the first of the 501st to choose to do this. But not the last.

* * *

Rex tips his canteen against a tree, watching with horrible fascination as blue sap curls into it, snakelike, until the container is filled to the brim. He stares into its depths. His stomach turns in queasy circles, and his hands shake. It’s been so long since he’s had water, so long, and his body is wracked with thirst, and yet he hesitates.

 _I’m going to die,_ he thinks, _But not here. Not now. Not on this Force-forsaken rock._

“Snow is sweet…” he murmurs to himself, not even aware that he’s doing it. “Snow is sweet…”

He lifts the canteen against his lips and drinks. It feels like surrender.

* * *

Anakin stands before the holotable in the command tent, thinking of Mother.

“...Ten men today, sir,” a trooper is saying. “Fifteen, if you count the ones that disappeared yesterday.”

Anakin’s hands shake. He takes his canteen from his hip and takes a long, slow sip of water. It’s the last the 501st has got, and he clings to it the way a drunk man clings to an anchorline in the shifting sands of the White Sea back on Tatooine, that desert so infamous for swallowing the stumbling unwary. Anakin knows how to live without water. Living on a desert planet grinds that skill into you, but Anakin isn’t prepared to use it yet.

He is afraid.

Afraid of his wife, who haunts his dreams, afraid that the blue sap will swallow him whole. 

He hasn’t slept in weeks.

“What did Bravo Squad find?” Anakin asks the room.

“Same as yesterday, sir. Nobody’s seen the Seppie base. Rex sent another group of trackers out today to look for Helcorru.”

“And the message to the Republic?”

“We couldn’t get anything working today, sir, but if we keep trying-”

Anger burns within him like a solar flare. His fists clench, and before he knows it he has a trooper by the throat, choking in midair, clawing at his windpipe and a small, dark part of him thinks, _Pathetic._

_(To think I called you Master)_

Anakin’s fists unfurl. The trooper crashes to the ground. The world is spinning around him, and Anakin can still taste the cold echoes of the Dark Side in his mouth, and it is _sweet…_

He shudders.

The trooper is still curled up on the ground. His breath peels from his throat in a ragged, high-pitched whine. “Someone get him to the med bay!” Anakin shouts, and while he wants it to mean _get him help,_ that dark part of him knows it’s really _get him out of my sight._

Anakin looks around at the other troopers. He can taste their fear; it sings to him…

“Dismissed,” he says. The troopers leave, wary, and Anakin knows that dinner is near and soon they will be out there licking the clotted blue sap from the trees, letting that poison churn within them, and he wants to vomit.

Instead, he goes back to his own tent and lies down on his bedroll. He knows he won’t sleep; he goes there to stare at the cool green canvas and reach alone into the darkness that surrounds him in this place. He has had a long time to think about this strange anomaly of the Force; he has decided that he started to feel this darkness after he met the Borum, after they made him taste their sap. The Dark Side is in those creatures, Anakin thinks. The presence he sensed that night when the comm was destroyed was no Sith Lord that he knew, but maybe it was one he didn’t. The Force had never lied to him before. He remembers Holleck son of Holleck, with his teeth like knives. Stars, he hoped he was a Sith. Anakin had never wanted to knock somebody’s teeth in so much.

Habit makes Anakin reach for Ahsoka in the Force. As always, she is somewhere beyond his grasp. He tries to remember what she looked like, but the image of her is starting to blur around the edges.

He thinks of Padme, and his cock grows stiff and warm under his hand and as he releases he remembers her pregnant, with blue tears running down her skin.

The next day, he runs out of water.

The day after that, he kneels in front of a tree, gathering clotted sap in his palm. He brings it to his lips and drinks.

It feels like surrender.


	10. Chapter 10

The Borum found the camp of the 501st in pieces.

Bits of metal poke up from the ground -- debris still not picked up after the great explosion, weeks and weeks ago -- catching on the Borum’s robes of lykskin, shining faintly with blue.

They found no man to hail their coming, save the one licking sap from a tree covered in shivering gust-roaches. He had the look of the milk in his eyes; he would be no good, they knew, and walked on in disgust.

The problem was that all of the men seemed to have been touched by milk madness.

The soldier that finally saw them coming raced forward to inform his master, this  _ Jedi,  _ that they were coming with the long, stumbling stride of one who is starving and yet touched by the physical benefits of Mother’s gifts.

The Jedi emerged from his tent alongside one of his soldiers, who was obviously of higher standing, as he did not bother to act with courtesy upon seeing their approach; instead, his eyes narrowed in suspicion.

Holleck son of Holleck stepped forward. He studied the soldier. They all looked the same, but he was almost positive it was the same captain he had spoken to after the Duskfire. His eyes rolled with the milk, but not the madness, he noted with some begrudging respect. His master, on the other hand--

He had the rage of a thousand fires burning in his eyes. The Borum could sense this, in the peculiar way that the Borum could feel the faint pulses of the thoughts of their loved ones around them in times of love or trial. It was impossible not to; the Jedi’s Mother-hate was the strongest they’d ever felt, and Holleck son of Holleck could even sense, with a twist of the Mother’s Eye clasped about his wrist, that the Jedi’s hate was not even in its latent stages.

By the Mother, if that hatred should increase--

Well, one shudders to think. Holleck son of Holleck had the sudden, bizarre urge to grin.

Such power should be in the hands of someone who could put it to good use.

_ I see your game, Mother. _

* * *

Anakin stared at the beings gathered before him and felt them in the Force.

Faint signatures, sure, but they were there. Holleck son of Holleck’s was the strongest, but it was clear that he was no Sith. Anakin was almost disappointed. He had been looking forward to putting a lightsaber between his eyes.

The sap made the thought a blur of indiscernible hate. Anakin was past the point of trying to grasp at it; it was too much work, and stars, Anakin was tired, he hadn’t slept in--

_ Lonesome is the shivering rain… _

The melody poured into him from somewhere, the mind of some trooper licking at roaches on bark. Drinking.

Anakin’s mouth watered. He thought of blue tears.

Rex stole the thought away from him, blinking images of courtesy into his head.

Right. Obi-Wan would not want him to forget his manners.

“Hello, Holleck son of Holleck. What brings you to our camp?”

Holleck son of Holleck smiled his horrible smile. “The same business as before, I’m afraid.”

“And what might that be?” Rex asked testily.

“By now, you are well aware that you have overstayed your welcome on our humble planet. We tried to warn you of this before, but you would not listen. We have come to you again in hopes that you will.”

Rage flamed in Anakin’s chest, but he fought to control it. “We can’t, we have no  _ ships _ \--”

“I’m sorry,” Holleck son of Holleck said softly, still smiling, “This was not a request. You will leave.”

“And the General’s telling you that we can’t,” Rex interjected. “Believe me, if we could, we would. If you could give us starships, we would gladly be on our way.”

Anakin gritted his teeth.  _ Gladly be on our way? _ Helcorru was still out there somewhere, and more men were going missing by the day. What was Rex thinking?

Holleck son of Holleck was laughing. “If we knew how starships worked, we could help you, Captain, but alas…” He stopped and picked idly at the edges of his black cloak made of some strange, shimmering skin. “If you insist upon staying, then I’m afraid we must discuss terms of war.”

“War?!” Anakin shouted, incredulous. “We aren’t doing anything to you, we have no quarrel-”

“Except that you have stayed on our land despite our warnings.” Holleck son of Holleck’s smile finally faded. His eyes were bits of jet on his long, pale face. “Now, Jedi, let us discuss this in the old fashion -- leader to leader.”

Anakin looked towards Rex miserably. There was no way that his men could win a damned war in the state they were in; he doubted if even he himself could survive it, with his thoughts in such a muddy jumble. “Go,” he said, and Rex left, albeit hesitantly.

Anakin’s best hope was to reason with the bastard. 

Negotiations. The kind without a lightsaber. The absolute worst kind.

He groaned inwardly, and wished that Obi-Wan was with him, or Padme ( _ stars, _ he missed Padme). They were actually good at this kind of thing.

Holleck son of Holleck took him by the arm and led him away from any probing ears. Anakin looked down and noticed the shine of a knife on his hip.  _ If he means to kill me- _

“I do not mean to kill you, Jedi.” The Borum slipped into an amused smirk.

“You-” Dumbfounded, Anakin couldn’t seem to get the words out, the sap was gluing his mouth shut -- “You can read…”

“I can read a great many parts of a mind under Mother’s sway. It’s a humble gift that comes from being a prophet.”

“I am  _ not _ under Mother’s sway…” Anakin grit his teeth.

“Whatever you want to call it is no matter. The point is, Anakin Skywalker, I know who you are. I know everything you’ve ever done.”

Holleck son of Holleck leaned in close, and Anakin smelled rotted things on his breath.

“I know about the Sand People.”

Anakin jerked away. “You don’t know what you’re talking about.” But his gut swelled with fear like some animal with claws raking doubts through his flesh, cold, clammy, familiar.

“I know, Ani, I know. It’s alright. I understand.” Holleck son of Holleck put a hand on his shoulder, and Anakin found it strangely comforting for a second, strange, that…

“... _ Ani… _ ” Anakin gasped the word,  _ he doesn’t get to call me that, he doesn’t have the right, _ but the thought floated away from him before he could catch it and all he was left with was something blurred around the edges.

“Anakin, we are very similar, you and I,” Holleck son of Holleck continued. “You see, I was a slave once, too. A smuggler’s ship crashed on our planet when I was a child. Unluckily, the damage was not too extensive, and my people were kind and shared with him our food and drink. That smuggler stole me from my bed and promised my parents that I would have a better life.” His eyes appeared to be looking past Anakin now, to some distant horizon.

“He took me to a planet called Polcon. Have you heard of it? It’s a cold place, a desert much like your Tatooine except that the sands are white and the freezing winds take your hands and your feet if you master lets them.” Holleck son of Holleck rolled up his left sleeve, and Anakin saw for the first time that two of fingers were missing. “One of the most popular punishments for a slave on Polcon was to leave them shivering on that wasteland with nothing but a thin scrap of cloth at their back for _ hours _ .” His lips curled back in a snarl. “But I made my way there. I proved myself. My master made me work at a fission plant, so I resigned myself to study it. And I climbed my way up that ladder, rung by bloody rung, until Count Dooku himself was bowing to me, asking for my services in creating a bomb that would tear the galaxy apart.”

“Dooku…” Anakin’s heart leapt with rage. He reached for his lightsaber, but his hands were too clammy to grasp it, and the impulse that had driven him there was already gone, sand in the wind.

“He asked me what I wanted. But I didn’t need credits or fame or glory. What I wanted was to be free. I wanted to go  _ home. _ ” Holleck son of Holleck gestured all around them, at the charred-black trees and the singing blue of their tears. “I wanted to  _ stay _ home, and I wanted the rest of the galaxy to  _ leave us alone. _ So I played Dooku’s little game for a while, I created his bomb, and after he left I destroyed any of the ships that would have let my people explore the stars. I burned them to rubble and told them to stay where it’s safe for them, away from the grasp of the greedy hands that would let a child shiver in the cold. And Mother saw this, and she loved me for it, and she gave me power beyond imagination. Her song is wonderful if you listen to it, Anakin.”

_ Snow is sweet,  _ Anakin thought. “This…” His mind spun in dizzying circles. Anakin bit into his cheek until he tasted blood, and they spun a little slower. “This has nothing to do with war.”

“This has everything to do with war.” Holleck son of Holleck frowned. “We understand each other, now. We understand how it will be.”

“Yeah, and how’s that?” Anakin bit harder into the soft skin of his cheeks, trying to make himself think, dammit,  _ think. _

“Your troopers may have taken our bomb. But they have not taken our spears. If you do not leave somehow, my friend, we will make you suffer. You personally, Anakin. Because I know you now, and I know what makes you hurt.”

Holleck son of Holleck showed his teeth. “And that is the way wars are fought on Mukkoth.”

He left Anakin to sort through the tangled knots of his thoughts.


	11. Chapter 11

Bravo Squad stumbles upon the scene of a massacre.

They’ve been walking for days, and their skin is rotted from the inside out with sores and lust for Mother. They’re just about to return to base; they’re so close to home, so close.

And then they see the bodies.

Hundreds of Borum, lying like marionettes cut from their strings, oozing black blood to mix with the blue. Their mouths open in endless screams.

And they are beautiful.

The dim glow of the sap flickers pretty patterns across their white skin, and their cloaks of unknown skin shimmer like the warped end of black holes, stretching impossibly through space and time in eerie beauty.

Their bodies are long and thin, inhuman. They are the bodies of women and children.

Bravo Squad watches all of this in awed silence.

They think of Mother.

* * *

Anakin looks upon the bodies of his enemies.

“What kind of a-” Rex’s voice is choked with tears. “What kind of a monster does this to his own _people_?”

Anakin can’t answer. The way the bodies are positioned looks intentional…

It looks _familiar._

Rage sparks within him, and soon a fire is roaring in his heart and the Dark Side curls around him like a beloved pet licking at his heels.

_(Every single one of them…)_

Anakin doesn’t remember much after that.

* * *

The Borum got what they wanted.

They hurt him.

Somewhere far away, Holleck son of Holleck rejoices. He has driven his enemy into a stumbling rage, a rage that will lead him straight into the arms of Mother. That same rage will burn in his chest like fission power, and once his enemy turns to Mother’s arms, it will be hers, and, by proxy, his. There are perks to being a prophet.

The bodies that he laid so carefully in the clearing were leftovers from a nasty pox season that has and is still currently sweeping through Borum settlements. Luckily, the pox, which is known locally as the “Invisible Knife,” leaves no trace of itself on its victims. All of the women and children that he dragged into place looked as if they are simply fast asleep, their mouths open in a way that reminded Holleck son of Holleck pleasantly of screams. A little poking with a spear, and his little bit of trickery was complete.

Holleck son of Holleck kicked at hands and feet for hours until he can got it right; he had to visit the Jedi’s nightmare visions again and again and again, and each time he did he felt the power curling at his core and he nearly went mad with want. Holleck son of Holleck had been devoted to power, both in the figurative and literal sense, since his parents gave him away. He hated them for that. He hated that they could take advantage of him, that one choice that they made in pure ignorance, believing that their son would return home soon, would cost him years and years of his life. Away from home. Away from Mother.

If they were still alive, Holleck son of Holleck might have added their bodies to the pile.

Forcing himself back into the present, he twists the Mother’s Eye bracelet around his wrist and brings the Jedi’s vision to his eyes again. Rage, charred meat… _Every single one of them,_ Mother whispers.

And that power, dark and twisted, growing all around him. It reminds Holleck son of Holleck of fission, of the atoms of suns tearing at each other in wisps of flame the size of planets. It speaks of energy, and there are a great many things that you can do with energy.

There are a great many things that you can do with hate.

And so Holleck son of Holleck lays his trap, and sits, and waits, tasting the sweetness of the Dark Side in his mouth. The Jedi will stumble blindly into their village. They will be waiting. They will make him feel such exquisite pain, but they won’t kill him; they will let him crawl to Mother’s heart, and they will let him die in her arms. It is the Borum’s version of mercy.

This is the way wars are fought on Mukkoth: The loser is sent to Mother.

Every war makes her stronger.

This is why she lets Borum survive. There can be no wars without beings to fight them.

* * *

The General’s eyes are feral yellow. That can’t be a good sign, Rex thinks.

The impulse that he sends through the sap is one of pure, crackling rage. It blocks out all thought, all sound. Rex grits his teeth and sends calming waves back to his men. Their minds need to be clear, dammit, this is the _last_ thing they need during a crisis.

“... _Kill them…_ ” The General commands in a snarl of pure hate. “ _All_ of them…” His voice is low and menacing, like a predator growling at wounded prey. His lightsaber ignites (blue, blue like curdled sap, Rex thinks, and feels sick), and he runs off into the woods without waiting for them to follow.

“No,” Rex says, when the General is gone. “No.” Because he can feel in those strong pulses of hate that the General means _all_ of them, all of the men and women and children that are left, because in his mind, their species is broken and needs to be fixed.

So Rex takes a stand. He gathers his troopers around him and bundles his thoughts together. “Brothers,” he says, “I can’t do this. I won’t. What we need to be doing right now is not fighting a war. What we need to be doing is finding this Mother creature and killing it!”

There is a long, ringing silence.

“Look what she’s done to us!” Rex sputters. “She’s made us into her mindless, hating, killing creatures. Well, we’re not! We are _men,_ and we will not die here on this Force-forsaken rock!”

There is a round of cheers, admiration rolling in a wave of impulse.

“I say it’s time we take the war to its source!”

 _Yes,_ his brothers say, with and without their lips. _Yes._ There aren’t too many of them left; twenty maybe, of the dozens that landed on the planet’s surface. But these twenty are the ones like him, the ones that can resist whatever spell the Mother has cast on the rest. It is their duty to use that somehow, Rex believes. To root out the problem at its source.

And so they all leave, in one last, desperate attempt to regain their freedom.

Except for Metalhead, who runs to the General’s side. He follows orders.

* * *

“They’ve all left you, General,” Metalhead says, disgusted.

“Traitors,” the General snarls. Power is palpable around him, radiating off him like a stench. Metalhead had joined him at first because he was worried about the General attacking alone, but now he feels that the General is more than capable of doing so. He doesn’t _feel_ like any other Jedi that he’s met, he doesn’t even feel like the Jedi he used to be. He is so much more than that now.

Stars, how that power _feels,_ even coming from another man…

Metalhead can taste it in their mind-flow. He loves it. He worships it.

 _I would follow you to the ends of the galaxy, General._ He is a good soldier, and he follows. The Dark Side tastes sweet in the General’s mouth, and the echoes of it make Metalhead shiver with possibilities.

* * *

Once, Metalhead was a boy who had dreamed of droids with their wires pulled out. He dreamed of blinking eyes torn from sockets, of electricity sputtering like air out of a blown tire. He dreamed of blood, and things worse than blood.

Metalhead was a smart student, a quiet student, and forever he learned. He was a specimen that the Kaminoans were particularly proud of; silent, obedient, and yet full of murderous ingenuity. He got things done, and didn’t have any moral qualms about it.

In other words, he was perfectly suited for Order 66.

The Chancellor saw this for himself after being engaged in a mission with the trooper. Afterwards, he personally assigned him to Anakin’s unit and raised him to the position of ARC trooper. It was the greatest day of Metalhead’s life.

Matched only by today.

Today, Metalhead marches at his general’s side, and his general _understands_ him.

Nobody had ever understood Metalhead before; his brothers called him _quiet_ and _strange_ and _scary_ and while Metalhead took a certain relish in the latter, he hated the rest. He has always had to walk his path alone, sure of his orders, trying to curb that wanton bloodlust that crept over him whenever a battle swung into frenzy. But now, Metalhead can smell it coming off of the General -- _Anakin,_ Metalhead thinks giddily, _Anakin, we’re friends, he understands, he is my_ friend -- and the air sings of blood about to be spilled, and Metalhead’s heart soars.

If Anakin notices, he doesn’t say anything. He mutters _every single one of them_ and slices through hanging vines with savage strokes of his lightsaber.

When they reach their destination, Metalhead’s heart stops.

They’re standing at the gates of the Borum village. There are no guards. This strikes Metalhead as a very bad sign, but the power radiating off of his companion stills his worry.

Still, he thinks--

_Stars, the balls on this one_

\--with some amusement.

They venture into the village, but it is silent, empty.

Then, with a war cry to split the skies, the Borum surround them. Metalhead almost wants to laugh; _These clever fools, they think they’ve sprung a trap, but_ they’re _the ones who are trapped._ They’ve hurt the General, and like any predator with a wound in its side, it makes him more dangerous than ever.

Anakin’s lightsaber sings blue at his side. Metalhead’s heart sings with it.

The massacre begins.


	12. Chapter 12

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> “Snow is sweet and hail is bitter,  
> Sour is the coming winter.  
> Lonesome is the shivering rain,  
> Sorrow melts when seasons change.”
> 
> -Kaminoan Lullaby (Adapted from Mandalorian folk song “Darasuum.”)

Finding the path to Mother wasn’t hard.

The footprints of dozens of men scattered the ground, fresh and old, made with boots and socks and bare feet. They found knee imprints, too, as if a few of the troopers had crawled along the path on their hands and knees like animals. The prints all led to the same place, Rex’s tracker insisted. East.

Rex’s troopers sang as they walked. “Snow is sweet and hail is bitter, lonesome is the coming winter…” Their voices joined in swelling harmony, smooth and strong. Rex’s heart pounded in his chest. The song sounded like home. It sounded like all of the brothers he’d grown up alongside on Kamino, all of the brothers he’d lost to the hands of a monster.

In his mind, Mother was a krayt dragon, curled and snarling. Her tongue was coated in sap and blood; it flicked forward and tasted the air, searching for meat. Rage clutched at Rex’s heart. _I will kill you and everything you love,_ he told the beast.

 _Will you now?_ it whispered. _I love everything, dear one. I love you more than you could ever know. Would you kill yourself?_

“I’m about to,” Rex said aloud. Behind him, his troopers hummed their approval; they had heard the conversation too. Mother’s words were clear as a crystal bell. 

They must be getting close, Rex thought. That was good. Hatred rose like bile in his throat. He longed to pull that flickering tongue from her mouth and hear her screams, to see blood gushing in waterfalls down her side, to see her writhe and shiver until she’d answered for everything, _everything_ she’d done. He’d pull her apart, live and quivering, like a damn Seppie.

 _I’ll tear her to pieces and feed each bloody clump to the General,_ Rex snarled, and laughed. Emotions swirled around him like whipcracks, blinding and sudden. Sometimes the sap would give him peace; sometimes it would give him hate. But through it all, Rex remembered what she’d done. He _remembered._ Not like that fool Helcorru in that flickering holodiary from so long ago, he was stronger than that, stronger than a Jedi for once, how ironic. Helcorru had been weak; that, Rex realized suddenly, was why he’d given the diary to Hostile. Hostile had been like him, he’d remembered everything, and now he tasted Hostile’s rage on his own lips and he understood.

Now Anakin was the weak one. And so it fell to him to finish what the Jedi could not.

They reached the mouth of a cave stretching forward into blackness. Rex licked his lips in anticipation. He tasted blood.

“Alright, men,” he said. “Be on your guard.” He drew his DC-17 and pressed it close. They switched on their helmet-lights and crept forward, placing one tentative step in front of another. The walls of the cave were covered in curdled sap, which pulsed in slow, rippling waves at intervals. A man behind Rex swiped some onto his fingers. It wriggled in his palm like a parasite about to burrow. He threw it down in disgust.

Finally, the cave widened, and Rex’s heartbeat drummed in his ears--

His flashlight went out. So did the light of the trooper next to him.

One by one, all of the lights died.

The walls of the cave pulsed with sap, growing and shrinking like the larynx of some great, heaving throat. They walked on. The darkness was thick and suffocating, and they had to feel their way forward by skimming the walls with their hands, digging their fingers into the pulsing flesh-like consistency of the sap. Rex shuddered. His thoughts were starting to slip away from him in this place, and for a time all Rex remembered was fear.

Blue light pulsed ahead, coaxing him near. He followed it into the cave's end.

And then Rex saw her.

* * *

His blaster dropped from his arms, forgotten.

She was beautiful. Stars, she was… She was _perfect._ Perfect nipples on perfect flesh, growing and swelling in waves of tantalizing beauty, and he can only gape in awe. Rex had never believed in gods before, but this was a _goddess_ given form--

And suddenly--

He was a boy, standing at the edge of a landing deck on Kamino. He was watching a storm stretch waves into fury. The waves were mouths swallowing each other, on and on, howling into the ends of time; they were the great snake that swallowed its tail and tasted infinity in its mouth. When Rex looked into their depths, he saw nothing less than the endless passing of time, and for a few short minutes he felt like some God staring down on the creation of his own universe extending past the ends of the galaxy. He tasted salt in his mouth; he cried. Eternity stretched below him. He reached for it with a child’s hands. This was beauty beyond beauty, life beyond life.

The waves flowed into forever. Tears dripped down Rex’s cheeks.

 _You are a boy, and you watch, and you love,_ Mother croons, and Rex says _yes._

“Snow is sweet,” he mumbles, walking forward. “You are sweet, and you are bitter… Sorrow melts as seasons change, it melts…”

 _It melts,_ his men agree. _It melts into_ \--

“Surrender,” Rex says, and he does. Finally, he does.


	13. Chapter 13

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hold me  
> Kiss me  
> Whisper  
> Sweetly  
> That you'll  
> Love me  
> Forever
> 
> -Peter Drake, "Forever" (1964)

Amidst charred, broken bodies, Anakin awakes.

He stares out into the mist rising like a stench above him. He shivers. The Dark Side tastes cold and sweet in his mouth in a way that makes him want to retch.

He forces himself to look at the Borum. The men, the women, the children, _all_ of them. He makes himself stand and walk among them, makes himself smell their plasma-burned skin still blowing faint smoke into the sky. _I did this,_ he thinks, and yet he still can’t quite get himself to believe it. _I did this._ The memories are there, of slashing and burning and screaming with hate but it’s agony even to reach for them; when he tries to grasp them he feels so cold it _hurts._ That hating, screaming man wasn’t him, it was someone with a furnace heart and a name like Darth. It was the same man that had burned that village of Sand People to the ground when he had watched his mother die crying in his arms.

Anakin walks amongst the dead, and can’t even bring himself to feel guilt; all he can muster is a deep, reaching sadness.

He stops, staring down at the still form of a woman splayed forward, twisted by the blaster wound to her chest. _Metalhead,_ Anakin registers dimly. The clone had followed him, hadn’t he? He’d been the only one who had. A small form is cradled at her side.

Anakin’s heart stops.

It's moving.

Anakin kneels, approaching it gently. A child’s face turns towards him. It's small and scared, and its eyes are full of hate. It trembles.

“It’s alright, little one, it’s alright. I’m not going to hurt you. The person who hurt you is gone,” Anakin says, attempting at a smile. Sadness rips a hole in his heart. He couldn’t take back what he had done, but maybe he could do this one small thing. Anakin reaches out his hand. The child looks at it. It spits on it. Then the child takes off running, and Anakin sees it turn its head back for just a moment before he hears the sound of a blaster bolt--

“No!” Anakin shouts, but he's already too late

\--and the child crumples to the ground, dead. Anakin turns and sees Metalhead standing behind him with a self-satisfied grin on his face. “Think that’s all of them, Anakin,” he says, and that small cold part of him whispers _he doesn’t get to call me that, he doesn’t have the right_ and Anakin’s hands ball into fists.

Metalhead’s face falls. “General, what’s wrong?”

“You’ve just murdered--”

“A Borum.” Metalhead’s face curls into a snarl. “A _disease._ They killed their own, sir. They’re not _right._ Would’ve been a mercy if we’d killed them from the start.”

Suddenly it’s all Anakin can do to swallow his building fury. No, he would not go down that path again, he would not become like this inhuman _thing._ He inhales, and when he exhales the feeling drops from his shoulders like dead weight.

“Leave,” he says, and his voice is steady. “Leave, before I kill you.”

A look of shock and betrayal crosses Metalhead’s face. “Sir, you were right there killing along with me, you can’t blame me for following orders…”

“I can. I will.” The words are strong as durasteel.

Metalhead’s mouth contorts into a snarl. He doesn't lower his blaster. “Those fucking _things_ don’t matter. They didn’t, and they don’t. You and I, we’re the only ones on this Force-forsaken planet worth a damn and now you _betray me_ !” Metalhead lets out a shot, and his aim is true. The bolt would’ve pierced Anakin’s heart if he hadn’t been ready for it; but he is, and he deflects it easily back into the trooper’s open throat. He collapses in on himself, his flesh smoking around the wound. _Another body for the pile,_ Anakin thinks, and loathes himself for it.

* * *

Anakin reaches for Ahsoka in the Force.

This time, she answers.

“Master.” Anakin turns, and she’s standing right beside him, real as the mud beneath his feet. She sits down, cross-legged, and he joins her.

Ahsoka closes her eyes, meditating. Anakin does the same. She is like a mountain stream flowing in calm, endless circles; Anakin is like a steady flame, pulsing with constant warmth and life. Together, they taste Anakin’s sadness and guilt and Ahsoka’s stream washes over him and tells him, _It’s alright, Master. I’m here. Let’s talk._

“Ahsoka.” The word chokes in his throat. “Ahsoka, I-- I missed you so much…” His eyes prick with sudden heat.

“Missed you too, Master.” An echo of her playful grin plays at the edge of her lips.

“Snips, I _worried_ about you!” Tears spill down Anakin’s cheeks, and he chokes out a laugh. “Force, it’s so good to see you again.”

“You were worried about _me?_ That’s a new one, Skyguy.” Ahsoka takes his hand, and her fingers are solid, and real. Her love is clear running water in the Force, washing him clean. Anakin wipes away at his nose, still chuckling idly. “Snips, I wish you didn’t have to see me like this.”

“I know.” Ahsoka squeezes his hand. Anakin’s heart twists in his chest. All around them, they can see his shame: bodies, with spears and without, littered like pale white ghosts twisted in expressions of final agony. She sees it all, and yet she still keeps her hand on his and shares in his sorrow.

“This is Mother’s work, not yours,” she says gently. “She twisted the Dark Side within you. Do you see what it does, Master? Do you see what happens when you love so much you lose yourself in it?”

Anakin doesn’t answer. In his mind, he thinks of Padme, and more tears roll down his cheeks.

“That’s your problem, Anakin. You love so much it destroys you. The Council makes you bottle it up and store it away in some dusty back shelf in your mind, but you can’t do that forever, Master, because bottles break. Everything breaks.”

He looks out at the carnage spread before him. “Everything breaks,” he agrees. 

Ahsoka turns, makes him look into her eyes. “You know what you have to do, Anakin.” She says it solemnly, like a prayer.

Anakin thinks of Padme. He thinks of his mother.

“I can’t,” he admits. “It hurts too much.”

“That’s your problem,” Ahsoka says, a little sadly. “A true Jedi wouldn’t hurt at all.”

* * *

Anakin stands. He begins to walk, following the trail to Mother.

He hurts.

He is no true Jedi.

* * *

Ahsoka leaves him at the mouth of the cave. “I love you, Anakin,” she says. “I hope you know that. You were always my brother.”

He pleads with her to stay, but in a moment she’s faded away and Anakin is left to walk into Mother’s jaws, completely, helplessly alone.

The cave is long and coated with writhing sap. Anakin’s gut twists into knots at the sight of it; the temptation is gone, at least for now. Ever since his talk with Ahsoka, Anakin’s mind has finally felt clear, or as clear as it can get on Mukkoth. For the first time in a long time, he feels the Light Side within him. He feels strong.

Anakin’s footsteps echo painfully loud against the vaulted rock. The smell is unbearable; a stench of oversweet sap and something dirty and filthy and rotted makes Anakin clamp a hand to his nose and cough. Stars, this place smelled like the worst alleys of Mos Eisley if you dumped even more bantha poodoo in them, and maybe a few stinking carcasses to round the whole thing off. Darkness made Anakin unsheath his lightsaber, casting blue shadows over it all.

Fear ratchets in Anakin’s chest. He is close; he can feel it. He tightens his grip on his lightsaber, his breath rising in short panicked bursts from his throat. _You know what you have to do,_ Ahsoka whispers in his mind.

* * *

Anakin stands next to his wife, holding his newborn child in his arms. _Leia,_ he thinks. _Her name is Leia._

Padme lies exhausted beside him, still strapped to the birthing pad, her hair plastered to her head in a sweaty mess of curls. She smiles, and she is radiant. “I think she looks like you,” she says.

Anakin looks down at the small, soft bundle he cradles. The child’s face is scrunched up in a red pout. Anakin can sense that it’s about to cry, so he bounces it a little, singing it a lullabye: “Snow is sweet and hail is bitter…” He can’t remember where he heard it from. She appears to like it; she smiles, and like her mother, she is beautiful.

“I don’t know,” Anakin grins. He kisses his daughter on the forehead softly, afraid that this weak, precious thing might break. “She has your smile.” He takes his wife’s hand. He loves her more than love, more than life in that moment, and it tastes sweet, as love should.

Padme reaches for him, and he settles down next to her. “I can’t believe you were right,” she murmurs against the folds of his robes. “It really was a girl.”

“I told you,” Anakin replies, smirking. Padme reaches up and kisses him, soft and slow and sweet. Then she settles her head on his chest, gathering her daughter into her arms. The three of them stay that way for a long time, moving in and out of sleep. They dream of sunlight.

* * *

The fields of Naboo sparkle with dew the next morning. Anakin sits with Padme, holding her hand and saying nothing as the sun rises, spinning patterns of spun gold on the river as it races to the horizon. Leia is sitting in Padme’s lap, sleeping, for once. Anakin’s mother sits and sews across from them, smiling. She smells like oil and slavestew sold at market. She looks healthy, like she’s finally been able to eat full meals, and she’s dressed in the softest of spun silks.

The four of them sit like that for a while, letting their awe carry them away from their thoughts.

Then Leia begins to fuss, and the spell is broken. Padme unties her bodice and slips a breast free. Leia sucks eagerly at her tit, burbling her delight. Only the milk is curdled and spoiled and blue, and it smells sweet and suddenly Anakin gets the feeling that something is very wrong.

“Anakin, are you alright?” Padme asks.

“Yes… yes, I’m fine.” He pushes his unease away. He’s home, he’s safe, what could possibly be wrong?

But he looks at the curdled blue slipping down Leia’s cheeks and he can’t help but remember. And stars, remembering is _agony._

 _You know what you have to do._ Anakin wished he had never met Ahsoka. But she was right.

“Anakin, are you sure you’re alright?” Padme repeats.

Instead of answering her, Anakin walks over and takes her hands in his, memorizing every inch of her face, of this moment. “I have to go,” he murmurs.

“You don’t have to,” his mother says behind him, putting down her needle. Her eyes are kind. “You could stay here as long as you like. You might die in days, but I can stretch minutes into decades. You would never feel pain again, so long as you love as strongly as you hate.”

A life without hate, without fear… A life where he could love, and be unafraid to love.

And he did. He loved Padme more than anything he’d ever known. He loved his daughter, and his mother, and this grassy place on Naboo where he’d fallen in love so many years ago, before battles and blood had become ordinary and the Dark Side had tasted sweet in his mouth.

It was tempting. Stars, was it tempting. But he could never live a lie. 

Anakin looked at Padme. He cupped her face in his hands and kissed her, long and soft and sweet. His right hand slipped down to his belt. “I love you,” he whispered, and then he ignited the blade and she slumped over, dead, in his arms.

The grief was instant and gutting. Anakin screamed. For a moment, he forgot whatever strange thing had reminded him to do this, and he was holding another Mother in his arms, sobbing, feeling this horrible knife of guilt in his stomach, rocking back and forth and thinking _everything breaks._ Leia was screaming too, horrible blood-filled cries that echoed the splashes of the red rising sun all around them.

Anakin’s mother was shrinking before his eyes, withering away into dust, and it just hurt too much, and Anakin wished to the stars to just end it all, he couldn’t _stand_ it--

And then--

He was standing. He was standing in a cave, looking down at the Mother-beast.

It was a rather ugly thing, more a huge, swollen mound than a creature. It mostly seemed to consist of gray flesh covered in a thin film of grease and hundreds, no, _thousands_ of nipples crossing from end to end. Anakin could find no hint of eyes or even a face. Lightsaber marks were burned into its flesh, and he noticed for the first time that his lightsaber was glowing blue at his side. He sheathed it.

He noticed, with some mild surprise, that he was crying. The echoes of grief still rang through him. He knew he hadn’t actually killed Padme, but some part of him still seemed to think so. The rest just ached in sympathy.

There were men gathered around that horrible gray thing, men that looked half starved or half dead. Human bones littered the floor around Anakin’s feet. His heart lurched with guilt. Those had probably been his men, once. Some of the starved men were still licking desperately at the nipples, trying to squeeze out some last bit of milk. Anakin saw one tear a nipple off with his bare teeth, wailing in despair.

“Anakin!” He turned, and saw one of the men come stumbling towards him. He was nothing but a bundle of skin and bone underneath his armor. Captain’s armor, Anakin noted.

_No… It couldn’t be…_

The man before him looked half dead.

“Rex?” Anakin breathed.

The thin, starved thing that had been a proud Captain of the Republic shuffled towards him, wiping clotted blue sap from its mouth. “I’m sorry, sir, I fought damn hard but I couldn’t resist her in the end… And I’m sorry for deserting, but you were mad, sir, you were mad, and…”

“Rex, it’s alright.” Anakin swung one of Rex’s arms around his shoulder, supporting him as he stumbled forward. Rex turned back, looking at the dim forms of the wailing animals that had once been his men. Then he limped forward once again. “Where are you going?”

"We have to get out of here," he panted. "This place isn't going to last much longer..." His eyes rolled madly in their sockets.

"What are you talking about?" Anakin asked warily.

"This place is tied to her, General. The whole planet. She manifests in the sap, that's how she gets in, sir, that's how she got into our heads. The planet will break itself apart without her to keep it all tied together."

"Rex, I think you need to get some rest--"

"No!" Rex jerked back, pulling his arm away. "No, sir, we can't. This planet is going to tear itself to atoms. She never leaves survivors, General, it's not her style. She'd want to die with her children."

The ground shook beneath their feet. 

"Rex, I want to believe you," Anakin lied, "But how could you possibly know this?"

"She showed it to us, General. She showed us everything." Tears welled up in Rex's eyes, and there was despair, and fear, and yet a deadly calm behind them. "When you're latched onto her you can hear her thoughts, you can _smell_ them." His lips pushed back into a snarl.

The ground shook again. Cracks began to splinter in the rock around them.

 _Tear itself to atoms..._ Though Rex looked half-dead, there was a spark of his old steel in his eyes. Anakin believed what he found in them.

"Come on!" Rex beckoned him forward, starting to run. Anakin followed, and not a moment too soon; the rock caved in behind them, and he heard a chorus of screams, and then he was running and stumbling, blinking into the light of day.

Rex turned back for a moment. A spasm of grief and pain crossed over his face. _There were men in there,_ Anakin thought. _Good men._

Then the steel returned to Rex's eyes, and he said, "We need to keep moving. Come on, General. I know where we can find a ship."

* * *

Rex took them a long ways into the woods, long enough that Anakin had to ask him if he really knew where he was going three times before they finally arrived.

The real Separatist bunker, the main complex, rose before them. Droids sat in deactivated piles all around it.

Rex started forward, but Anakin held him back. “Wait!” he hissed. “What about the bomb?”

Rex stared at him blankly. “I thought Holleck told you,” he said. “Mother told me he did. Cutter, Nerves, Spare, and Tails took it a while back. They used it to blow up the ship.”

 _Of course they did,_ Anakin thought, incredulous. Looking back, he wondered why he hadn’t stopped to think about how they had gotten up to the _Perseverance_ in the first place. Still, he had to cut himself some slack; he’d been at least half gone at that point.

“That’s actually where I got this idea from. See, when they turned traitor, they borrowed a Seppie ship from here and rode it into space with full gear and rebreathers on. Luckily, I always keep some in my pack.” Rex slung it off his back, fished around, and handed one to Anakin. “As for the gear, well… We might have to improvise.”

Anakin nodded. “It’s crazy, but it might work.”

The ground rumbled beneath them. It seemed that they wouldn't have a choice.

Anakin’s “improvisation” was taking a tactical droid’s head, emptying it, and jamming it on his own. Rex followed suit. They walked together into the shipyard, looking utterly ridiculous. They stumbled into a ship, and after a bit of tinkering Anakin got it into the air, breathing a great sigh of relief.

As they shot further and further into the sky, the ground shrunk beneath them and Anakin couldn’t help but think _Thank the Force._ Holleck son of Holleck had been right about one thing; they had stayed on that hellhole far too long.

They broke through the clouds and for the first time in months, Anakin saw the stars.

He thought he had never seen anything more beautiful. Padme, maybe. The thought twisted like a knife in his heart.

They passed the wreckage of the _Perseverance_ and the _Ambition,_ looming like shining monoliths in their path. Anakin had to swerve to avoid the frozen body of a trooper spinning through space. He saw Rex turn white. “I knew him,” Rex whispered.

“I’m sorry,” was all Anakin could say. As they sped further and further away from their doom, Anakin could sense that he would be saying that a lot in the future.

* * *

“Obi-Wan, are you there? Obi-Wan, do you read me?”

Anakin and Rex sit in a dirty cantina, grasping at an ancient comm pad that charges by the minute. The bartender, an old Besalisk, keeps glaring at them with suspicion, wiping away at a glass that Anakin thinks must certainly be clean by now. Then again, he has a reason to be suspicious; they are starved and dirty, and they had been forced to pay in Republic credits. This was Separatist space; while the former might not raise an eyebrow on a backwater planet like this, the latter certainly would.

Anakin tries again. “Obi-Wan, do you read me? Come in, Obi-Wan.”

There’s a blast of fuzz. Then, finally, the voice of his old master comes through. “This is General Obi-Wan Kenobi of the Grand Army of the Republic. I don’t know how you got this frequency, but--”

“Obi-Wan, it’s me, Anakin,” he protests. Force, it feels good to hear his voice. He thought he’d never get to hear it again.

“Anakin?” Obi-Wan’s voice chokes and stutters on the other end. “Stars, I thought… I thought you might be dead. Why haven’t you been answering our transmissions?”

Rex and Anakin exchange looks. “We ran into a bit of trouble,” Anakin says quickly.

“Ah.” Obi-Wan sounds like he was expecting that response. “Well, I was just on my way to rescue you. We’re approaching Mukkoth as we speak.”

“We’re not on Mukkoth.”

“What?” Obi-Wan sounds completely bemused.

“We’ll explain later. Right now, we’re on Vistum. It’s not too far away. Mind giving us a lift?”

“Us? Who’s with you, Anakin?”

Rex clears his throat. “Uh, just me, sir. Rex, that is. Of the Five-oh-first.”

“I’ll explain everything when you get here,” Anakin interrupts. “Just please, get here soon.” He eyes the bartender, who eyes him back. “I don’t think they like us here.”

* * *

“Copy that.” Obi-Wan ends the transmission. He stands on the bridge of his _Leader,_ arms crossed, looking out to the stars. Just what had his former padawan gotten into this time?

“We’re approaching the coordinates, sir,” one of the troopers tells him.

Obi-Wan stares out into the black desert waste of nothing spread before him, searching for a planet, but he doesn’t see it. His brow furrows. “Are you sure these are the right coordinates?”

“They are, sir.”

 _Curious,_ Obi-Wan thinks. “Take us closer.”

“Sir yes sir.”

The _Leader_ floats forward until a flash of metal catches Obi-Wan’s eye. As they move closer, Obi-Wan watches it stretch and lengthen into the shapes of Venator-class star destroyers. Destroyers, _plural._

His breath hitches in his throat. He hears murmurs from the troopers around him. “Closer, if you would.”

“Yessir.”

They slide in next to the bent, twisted hull of a ship. It seems a bit different than the other destroyers he’s seen, equipped with larger engines and cannons. _That’s the_ Ambition, he realizes with a shock. Then that ship next to him must be--

Obi-Wan sighs. _Oh, Anakin, just what have you stepped into this time?_

He searches wildly once again to see if his eyes are deceiving him, but there’s not a planet in sight. “Where’s Mukkoth?” he asks.

“Sir, it doesn’t appear to be… It doesn’t appear to be here.” The trooper looks up at him in shock.

“Trooper, recheck your coordinates.”

“I did, sir, and it’s not there. It’s like it never existed in the first place.”

Obi-Wan scans the stars, deep in thought. _Stranger and stranger._

"Set a course to Vistum," he commands. "I think I have a few questions for Anakin."

* * *

When Anakin sees Coruscant, he weeps.

Obi-Wan feels his sorrow and his pain in the Force, and it makes his heart ache in his chest. Anakin looks like he weighs about twenty pounds less than he did when he left the Temple. He’s wearing a pair of Obi-Wan’s robes, and they hang off his body like curtains. His own were so ratted and dirty when Obi-Wan found him that they almost fell apart at his touch. Obi-Wan's eyes sting with sudden wetness.

Rex stands beside Anakin. He’s too weak to wear his own armor, so he stands in his officer’s gear. That, too, hangs off in folds. He places a hand on Anakin’s shoulder.

Together, they grieve for the 501st.

It doesn’t feel right to interrupt them. Rex’s despair is blinding agony in the Force, a red-hot, stinging pain. Anakin shoulders some of it.

“It’s over,” Rex rasps, and he smiles. “The nightmares are finally over.”

“Finally,” Anakin agrees. He smiles too.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Wow. The final chapter. It almost feels sad to see it end.
> 
> I sat down and wrote this not knowing if I would ever finish. I've tried again and again over the years to write a long story to its entirety, and despite thinking of a lot of things I wanted to explore I've never truly finished one until now.
> 
> That was my goal: to sit down and finish one of my stories. For once. Just to see if I could do it.
> 
> As always, thanks so much for reading. I feel like I've grown a lot in the process of writing this. It always made my day to read the comments and see some results from my work.
> 
> P.S. There's still an epilogue coming, so watch out for that :)


	14. Epilogue

Anakin stands in front of the Council.

He lays his lightsaber at their feet.

“Anakin...” Windu is aghast, searching for words. “I understand that the death of your battalion was a great loss. Are you sure that you are thinking clearly?”

“I’m not,” Anakin says. “I haven’t been for some time now.” He studies each member of the Council, seeing them in a way that he’s never seen them before. They are the essence of Light, bright and fierce, their feelings as flat and solid as the horizon. “I think you know this,” he says. He feels their shock; it warms him. “I think you knew this even when I was a boy. I could feel how afraid you were of me back then, and now I understand why.”

He remembers long white bodies, the sweetness of sap against his lips--

“I love too much,” Anakin admits. There are tears in his eyes. “I love, and yes, I hate, because I am not a Jedi. I can’t cut those feelings off; they are who I am. If I stay here and keep shoving them away I’m going to do something terrible, I can feel it. The Dark Side grows every day that we fight this war; I have sensed it, and I know you all have too. Its pull is strong. I was too weak to fight it on Mukkoth. If I continue to fight, it will swallow me whole.”

Obi-Wan’s pain is sharp and bright in the usually gentle flow of consciousness between the Masters. Anakin’s eyes blur with tears; he can’t even look at his former master. This is shameful, and it _hurts,_ but it’s right.

“So this is me, taking responsibility for my actions. For once.” He lets out a half-smile. A sob hitches in his throat.

There is a long silence. Surprisingly, Yoda is the first to speak. “Right, you are,” he agrees gravely. “Too old, were you, when you were taken. Terrible, yet necessary, this choice was.” The old green creature leans back into his seat, deep in thought. “Leave, you must.”

“Master,” Shaak Ti interjects softly. “Skywalker is the Chosen One. Is it not still his destiny to destroy the Sith?”

“His decision, his destiny is.” A great tiredness ripples from Yoda in waves. “Tricky things, prophecies are. Change, they do.”

For the first time, Obi-Wan speaks. “Anakin… Are you _sure?_ ” His voice is thick and clotted with emotion. A dangerous thing, that; indecent in a Jedi Master, Anakin thinks, and disgust coils in the base of his spine.

And yet--

Anakin looks at the faces of his mentors, his friends. He stares out into the skies of Coruscant and thinks that this is the last time he’ll ever get to see such a view. Everything he ever learned, everything he ever _knew,_ was here. He was supposed to sit in one of those chairs one day and be a Master, wise and cool above all of the people scattered like ants below them, a bright void of light in the Force. His path had been so lonely, and so clear.

“I’m sure.” His voice is steady.

The Council murmurs with itself in the Force. Mace Windu is chosen to speak.

“Jedi Knight Anakin Skywalker,” he begins, “We accept your dismissal from the Jedi Order. We strip you of all ranks and privileges, and dismiss you from your duties.” His eyes meet Anakin’s, bold and steady. “May the Force be with you.” There is something like begrudging respect behind those final words.

Anakin bows. “Thank you, Masters. I will never forget everything that you have done.” He smiles, and turns to leave.

\---------

“Anakin, wait.” Anakin turns and sees Obi-Wan running towards him. He stops, and Obi-Wan steadies himself against a pillar, catching his breath.

“Master?” Anakin smiles, surprised. “Isn’t the Council still in session?”

“It is,” Obi-Wan gasps, sputtering. “How _do_ you do it, Anakin? Being impulsive is _exhausting._ ”

For a moment, Anakin is shocked. Then he laughs, first a little, then loudly, and Obi-Wan claps a hand on his shoulder and leans there, and he’s laughing too, and they embrace, laughing and crying and remembering all of their years.

Obi-Wan pulls himself back. “I’m going to miss you, Anakin.”

“You too, Master.”

“Obi-Wan.” An amused smile plays at his lips. “Call me Obi-Wan.”

“Right.” Anakin’s smile lessens a little. “It’s just Obi-Wan, now.”

There’s a long, comfortable silence. 

Then Obi-Wan says, “Give my regards to Padme. I hope you’ll be happy together.”

Anakin recoils in shock. “You knew?”

“Always. You didn’t hide it very well.”

“I guess I didn’t.” Anakin doesn’t know what quite to say. It all seems too little, and too much.

Obi-Wan’s smile turns sad. “Goodbye, Anakin. May the Force be with you.”

“And with you, Obi-Wan.”

He walks away.

\---------

Rex sits, polishing his gun, and tries to ignore the whispers.

The men on the _Morale_ don’t speak to him, but Rex hears them. _There’s the Captain that lost his whole command,_ they whisper. _The five-oh-first, didn’t you hear? Every one of them’s dead._ Sometimes they spit when they say it.

Rex just stares at the glossy sheen of the gun in his lap. The words sting, but he doesn’t think about them. More often than not, he thinks of Tupp and Fives and Cutter and Builder and even Metalhead. Their names are always on his lips.

Last night, he had a dream where he was standing at the bridge, on top of it rather than under it like he is now with the Fifty-Second Battalion. He saw men floating there like marionettes on strings with blue liquid pooling from their mouths. They sang _snow is sweet and hail is bitter,_ and behind them stretched a sea of cold distant stars.

_An evil man, that one… Stupid, or just plain mad. He left his men to rot…_

Rex keeps his eyes down. Their words are meaningless. Nobody could hurt him worse than he hurts himself. Guilt and self-loathing are old friends now. Sometimes when he can’t sleep in his bunk he sits with his gun in his hands and thinks of blackness. He wonders what those floating dead men were looking at so peacefully outside the _Ambition._

_Left them to die…_

I did, Rex thinks to himself. _I did._

\---------

Anakin sits with Padme in perfect sunlight.

The sun is high and hot in the sky on Naboo, and the ground smells of summer beneath their feet. Bushjumpers chirp and buzz in lazy rolls of sound, pushed from their burrows by the heat. Luke and Leia run after them, grinning and tripping over themselves in their haste.

“Hey, be careful!” Padme shouts after them. She starts to get out of her seat, but Anakin pushes her down, giving her a playful peck on the cheek. “I’ve got them,” he says. He runs towards the twins, grinning. They giggle and run even faster away from him; Anakin catches Luke and slings him onto his shoulder, giving him a big smack on the cheek. “Got you,” he gloats, and Luke burbles in delight. He motions for Leia with his other hand, and she comes to him, but then she pulls on his leg and he crumples slowly to the ground, laughing and rolling in the grass, getting all three of them covered in dirt from head to toe.

When they stop, Luke and Leia lay their heads on his chest, and all three of them stare up at the clear, spinning blue above them. He feels the rise and fall of life in his children below him, soft and warm and fierce, and his heart feels fit to burst with love. _I would do anything for you,_ he tells them silently, _anything at all._

And for a moment, perhaps the first moment in Anakin’s life, everything is right.

\----------

“We’ve got a message for you, sir.”

Anakin looks at the troopers in disbelief. Then, collecting his thoughts, he says, “You must be looking for my wife, Padme. She’s a senator.”

“We know, sir. We were looking for you.” One of the troopers hands him a datapad.

Anakin skims through the message and suddenly finds it hard to breathe. Padme slides in behind him, looking at the troopers with interest. “Ani, what’s going on?” she asks. He hands her the datapad without a word.

“CT-7567… Anakin, did you know this clone?”

Anakin swallows. “It’s Rex,” he replies. The words stick in his throat.

“I’m so sorry, sir.” The clone that had given him the datapad takes his helmet off. His eyes are swimming with tears. “He was a good man. He died with honor. Our ship was set to blow, and someone had to drive it… Bravest thing I ever saw.”

Anakin wipes at his own eyes. “So he died for his men. He would’ve wanted that.” He looks up at the clone. “Did you know him?”

“Yes. He was a good man. A quiet man, but a good one. He didn’t have many close friends, but in the end we all grieved him as a brother.”

Guilt twists in Anakin’s gut. That didn’t sound like Rex at all. What had Mukkoth done to him?

“Thank you,” he tells them firmly, and then they say something to Padme and they're gone, and Anakin’s world spins in circles around him. Padme goes to him then, holding him as he sinks to the floor in sobs, murmuring _it’s okay it’s okay_ and he clutches at her arms like a lifeline, sinking in the weight of his despair.

“I’m sorry this happened to you,” Padme tells him softly, running her hands through his hair. “The war, the nightmares… All of it. I hope you know you don’t have to go through it alone anymore.”

“I know,” Anakin says. He reaches up and traces the line of her jaw, memorizing every fold and crevice by feel. “I know.”

\---------

The Clone Wars end ten years later than Sidious had planned.

He waits a long time for Anakin to return. Long, long years… Until the Council turns against him and tells him once again firmly that it is his time to step down as Chancellor, and this time they bring their lightsabers with them when they do it. He has no choice but to act, spreading the gospel of Order 66 and cackling as they fall.

Dooku is a worthy apprentice. He is powerful, smart, and cruel. But he isn’t the right one.

When the Order falls, Sidious continues to wait. _He has felt it,_ he tells himself. _He would be blind if he did not. He will come. He will try to kill me, in his abounding anger._ He smiles at the thought.

\----------

“Don’t go,” Padme says, cupping his face in her hands. She cries. When Anakin kisses her, her lips taste like salt.

“Don’t go,” Obi-Wan says. He’s battered and broken, his face in his hands. He cries bitter tears, and tells them after a long time about how his troopers turned against him, how the Republic is in the hands of a Sith, an old, dear friend that Anakin has known for a long time.

“Don’t go, Daddy,” say the twins. They don’t understand what’s going on, but they chip in all the same, looking with wide, worried eyes as Padme tries to do the dishes, drops a plate, and slumps to the ground, tears rolling down her face. “I’m not going,” she tells him, sobbing. “I’m not going back ever again.”

For once, Anakin listens.

He stays.


End file.
